


fra tanti affanni

by febricant



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: Child Abuse, Coming of Age, Intricate Rituals, M/M, Murder, heavily implied patricide, mafia rituals, opera - Freeform, this is an au in which primo is an opera singer. make of that what you will., underage if you're American regular age if you're normal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:49:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28405044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/febricant/pseuds/febricant
Summary: It was originally the Greek form,said Primo, smoke leaking out his nose, silent coloratura, a low and soundless embellishment.It was ours first. Opera.
Relationships: Leonardo/Primo Nizzuto, Primo Nizzuto/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 37
Kudos: 105





	fra tanti affanni

**Author's Note:**

> This deserved an edit it didn't get, but I simply cannot keep looking at it or I will go insane. This exists in part because MissAntlers and Lagardère have been incredible cheerleaders and also fellow trust rat king members. Kasia has made too many gifs, so she also gets some blame. lastly, thanks always to L, who reads my nonsense. 
> 
> Whatever is good is because of friends and all the extraneous semicolons are my evildoing.

_It was originally the Greek form,_ said Primo, smoke leaking out his nose, silent coloratura, a low and soundless embellishment. _It was ours first. Opera._

He was right, in his own way. Or at least, nobody cared to argue with him.

-

At fourteen, Primo was still singing with the choir.

A small church in a small town buried in the side of a mountain in the Serra, a tooth in the empty gum of an ancient place. A place that echoed.

It had begun to bleed its youth into the cities, like everywhere else.

There were still enough of them for a choir, for the kind of mingling of voices required for basic worship, around the work of the fields and orchards and the very few of them who already looked toward a trade. Boys with big, rough hands and a light in their eyes on Sunday morning, and Primo, in among them.

Whatever Primo was worshipping had been a mystery all his life, but that wasn’t the biggest question.

It was rare for anyone to discover a natural talent, with so little scope to find them. It was rarer still to find a talent like a God-given voice in a boy so much like Primo; one who revelled in the cold and the heat, one who had come to meagre rehearsals on Thursday nights with scraped lips and cold fingers, until one hot, hot summer night he arrived with a smile and a pack of his father’s cigarettes to share with the others afterwards.

People went missing in the mountains, from time to time. It wasn’t unheard of. Nothing about Primo was unheard of; not his large, pale eyes or his rapidly-lengthening frame, now that he only fed himself instead of himself and his tragically lost father, whose bones might have been found by a shepherd’s dog in the autumn, deep in a valley with a fast-running stream.

Nothing unheard of. Just rare.

Maybe there was another version of him somewhere; one where his voice died in his throat, or got sanded away, eroded by time and the weather in the mountains and his father’s big hands around his neck, but it wasn’t this one.

-

Napoli was too close to home.

Not close enough, but too close for comfort, a slip in the dialect, a spice in the food, a kind of likeness which said: _just around the corner, if you look._

-

“Hey, _Primo Uomo,_ ” one of the choralists called to him, “Careful, the director’s looking for you.” She glanced at his cigarette, faint disbelief on her face. “He’ll smell it.”

“So?”

She looked around the alley behind the theatre, the wide piazza beyond it where the cast went after rehearsals, where Primo had seen one of the brasses from the local orchestra, maybe the first trumpet, getting sucked off in a dark corner by one of the many camp followers theatre companies accrued, people who liked reflected talent more than they liked money, knowing full well that most artists didn’t have any. “ _So?_ ” She mimicked. “You’ll ruin your voice!”

“Did I ask you?” he said, smiling at her.

“Pervert,” she spat, matter-of-factly. “It’s the only thing about you that matters.”

“Fuck off back to Tyrol, Nazi bitch. We’ll see who the reviews mention, won’t we?”

She gaped at him. He flicked the end of his cigarette at her and lit another, waiting for the director to find him.

Primo had an allergy to being summoned.

-

 _Primo Uomo_ had been a joke, once.

-

“Idamante was originally a castrato role,” the director said, as though Primo didn’t know, as though he was some neophyte who could ape the notes and yet couldn’t possibly internalise the history of his craft. “Tell me why I shouldn’t return to tradition and cut your fucking balls off.”

Primo smiled at him. “Try to find a replacement, and we’ll find out.”

“Please,” the director said, “there are six dozen of you waiting at La Scala, and any one of them would come down here and learn the role in half a fucking day.”

“Yeah?” Primo asked him, wide-eyed, feigning fear. “And how many of them can act?”

The director snatched the cigarette out of his fingers. “Crazy piece of shit, let’s see what happens when you make a fool of yourself and none of your fucking patrons steps in then, hm? Don’t test me. I didn’t cast you.”

“Even more reason why you can’t fire me,” Primo pointed out, lighting another one. “You want drama?”

“I want to leave Napoli alive,” the director hissed. “I want you to sing, not croak like a frog. I want the fucking chorus to pretend they can mime a shipwreck. I want a _drink._ ”

“I can give you two out of four.” Primo blew a stream of smoke in his face, lips soft, eyes wide.

-

The director’s hotel room was nicer than Primo’s.

“It would be less interesting if you castrated me,” Primo said to his naked back, “wouldn’t it.”

“The rumour about your cock better not be true.”

“Which one?”

“If I drop dead I’m sure you’ll notice.”

“Debatable,” Primo said, and left.

-

The season in Napoli ran from January to May.

Snow months, Primo thought. The months when there was an ancient quiet in the mountains, streams frozen over until the spring melt, everything heavy and white except for the acid blue of the sky, the searing, silver cold of the air.

He could go home.

-

“He’s an orphan,” the other students had said, when Primo had turned up in Rome. “Homeless.”

It hadn’t been true, then, and it wasn’t true yet, either, but Primo had no second plan and no second chance, and a myth left to make itself was unpredictable, prone to holes and critique, so Primo had taken the rough clay of assumption and molded it into something replicable, a story people could tell each other when he wasn’t in the room.

-

He took off for Calabria the week before the dress rehearsal, when the stage crew went briefly on strike over back pay, and a note appeared in his dressing room.

He’d had so many like it; cryptic, condescending, a bouquet of flowers with as much pollen as possible, a weaponised fecundity, an itch in the back of his throat.

 _We know where you are,_ it said, not in so many words.

-

Primo had loved the opera from the instant the first notes hit his ears, a whole-body stillness descending upon him at the sound.

He couldn’t have known this, of course.

He couldn’t have possibly remembered being an infant in arms, wide-eyed, struck silent by the vibration of a chest, the quiet defiance of beauty being made where it didn’t belong, being given to him to see what he would do.

He would never remember the particular timbre of his mother’s voice, or the hoarse catch of her vanishing high notes, the way her range diminished and diminished until she was a contralto rasp in the back of his mind, disappearing before she left for good.

It was the records he remembered, the scratching of the needle and the tinniness of the speaker, the way the vinyl had crackled before the voices formed out of the ridges and grooves.

It had never sounded quite like a human voice, when it had been flattened out like that. It had never vibrated the way it was meant to, never swelled inside his chest, never burst forth as though indomitable, a pure, controlled shriek of joy or aching swoop of bitterness.

It had sounded like ghosts in the room, like something he half remembered, like something hidden in the darkness of the house he haunted.

It had sounded like something forbidden and bloody and lovely, and he had craved it with all of his soul.

A craving was just like anything else in the rippling mountains; something to be ignored, at best, something to push aside for other work. Something suffered by the pregnant, the weak-minded, the idle. Something to be ridiculed, if it persisted.

-

“He’s always listening to those fucking records,” Primo heard his father grumble, once, twice, three times, his basso voice taking on a nasal quality as he drank, as he griped to his brother, as though Primo couldn’t pick out their voices from outside, couldn’t distinguish tone and timbre and inflection while he was in the dusty courtyard, pointlessly washing the car. It was a waste of water and an obvious way to keep him near but out of the way, a distraction.

Primo dumped the soapy bucket into the seams of the windows, hoping to stain the seats with something other than the blood his father never bothered to really eradicate.

“So?” Salvatore asked, his tobacco-wet rasp distinctive. “Get rid of them. Beat some sense into him. It’s about time he started pulling his weight, isn’t it?”

Primo watched himself hauling another bucket of water as though from a great distance, something in his throat stuck fast, a kind of vestigial rage which had never gone away. It had been there as long as he had known how to notice it, a tightness in his jaw, silence growing into him.

Primo wasn’t sure what pulling weight meant, if one wasn’t a fucking horse. He wondered if it looked like shooting dinner because his father was blind drunk slumped over the bar again, or if it meant the kind of thing nobody ever spoke about to each other, the silent understanding of everyone he knew that his father had unlimited credit because his uncle was someone to be feared, a king in the mountains. A Pharaoh, a Lear, an Idomeneo.

His father had unlimited credit because there was always blood on the seats of his car, because he was a hand to be used; a Rigoletto, a Caliban, a beast of burden.

Primo drove the car home before his father emerged from Salvatore’s house, smiling his way past the bored, hungry boys covering Salvatore’s gates, his thighs wet with the water he had successfully ruined the seats with.

Primo knew the mountains better than his father ever could. Only people light on their feet made it up and down the way he’d learned to, and only those light enough to suffer the cold knew which of the old huts buried up there were proof from the weather.

It was worth it, to come home to rage, an impotent, obvious emptiness in what had once been a woman’s parlour, a space where a record player had been, hand-cranked and ancient, a mark on the mouldering carpet where boxes had lain, stacked on top of each other, pressing rectangles into the floor.

Primo met the fist with his teeth, and bit back, hard enough to earn a yelp, a falsetto squeak, high in the nose.

“What’s wrong with you?” his father asked him, half-awake, half-aware, at best half-alive. “You’re just like your bitch mother, aren’t you? No respect for anyone.”

Maybe it was true. Primo hadn’t disputed it, at least, choosing instead to duck under the next lumbering swing and shoot straight out the door, heading for the church, with its comforting echoes.

There was no chance his father would follow him to the mountains, but he wouldn’t risk it. Not yet.

-

His uncle’s house out of the village had mouldered with the years as well, Primo thought, arriving in the snow, eyeing the way ice had collected in the gutters, overspilling in icicles, ready to fall, little blades of Damocles suspended over the ancient door.

Every time he came, it looked smaller, meaner, more decrepit.

The lights were on, but there was never any music. Primo turned off the car, sitting in the warmth for a while, the burgundy upholstery still the same, water-stained and familiar. The cassette cut off halfway through a phrase, unresolved.

Salvatore was in the kitchen, of course. He was always either in the kitchen or the barn, a predictability that Primo found repulsive.

Leonardo, he didn’t see, hidden in the shadow of the door, calmly skinning a rabbit on the table by the window, his hands only lightly stained with its viscous, well-hung blood.

“Ah, Primo,” Salvatore said, sarcastically, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’re thin.”

“Thank you,” Primo countered, smiling as much as he could. “I got your message.”

“What message?” Salvatore snapped, pretense of welcome melted away. “I don’t send you any fucking messages.”

“My mistake,” Primo said, easily. “Maybe I thought you were thinking of me.”

Leonardo turned the rabbit inside out, pelt slipping off it like a spent glove.

-

The summer after Primo’s father had gone missing, Primo sang at a funeral in Reggio Calabria. The works, a weeping widow, a kind priest, an organist, a hymn or three he’d sung a hundred times, could sing with his eyes closed, for all he needed the sheet music.

Whether he could read it or not had been an exercise in what-if, anyway.

Mostly, Primo listened, and learned, and repeated, and then it was his, buried in his mind to do whatever he wanted with.

Leonardo drove him, because the dead man was his cousin. Removed or something, but a relative, someone whose funeral he’d go to with a good suit on and a sprig of flowers for the widow wrapped in newspaper in the backseat.

“Did you tell the priest to ask for me?” Primo asked him in the car, taking a cigarette out of Leonardo’s open box and lighting it before Leonardo could snatch it away from him. “Or did our old pervert come up with the idea of it himself?”

“Don’t smoke that, you’ll ruin your voice.”

“Does it matter?” Primo took a drag, performative, but pleasurable in itself, the nicotine a kind of jolt he’d never found anywhere else, a jagged spike of adrenaline straight to the lungs. “Nobody will care, anyway. It’s a funeral.”

His voice had only just broken, his full tenor range just around the corner, all the roles he’d kept so close to his heart for so long ready and waiting for him to stretch into them. Gone were the high notes of the old castrati, the thin, boyhood choral arrangements, and in their place the uncertain middle ground of adolescence.

“You should care,” Leonardo said, heated the way Leonardo always was, an ember of a man, someone who suited his name, in the strange and indefinable way some people did.

They weren’t cousins, Primo and Leonardo, but they were family, of a sort. The kind that went through Salvatore, a patriarch of his small fief, who had sponsored Leonardo and all his hot-headedness into someone who had a standing invitation to Salvatore’s home, who was being trusted with Salvatore’s troublesome nephew.

“Why?” Primo asked, holding it out the window so Leonardo couldn’t reach across him and capture it.

“Because you’re talented enough to get the fuck out of here,” Leonardo said. “Give me that.” The car swerved across the road as Leonardo took advantage of Primo’s shock to grab the cigarette out of his slackened fingers.

He put it between his own teeth and turned up the radio. “Sing me something. Warm up. I can say I knew you before you were famous, you twisted little fuck.”

Primo sank into the kind of sullen silence reserved exclusively for teenagers who had been badly startled.

“Fine, don’t.” Leonardo tapped his fingers on the steering wheel for a kilometre or so, until he started singing along to the radio, a tuneless effort with poorly articulated lines, and Primo wanted to laugh but couldn’t, so he joined in instead. It passed the time, he told himself. Time would pass.

-

Leonardo’s cousin had been young, and his cousin’s widow was very beautiful.

They had no children, Primo learned, listening to the other choristers gossiping, ignoring the sheet music he’d only pretend to look at.

She was tall. She had a black veil over her black hair.

 _Grief looks good on her_ , he found himself thinking, watching Leonardo give her the mountain flowers, watching her take them, bemused at the kindness of the gesture.

Her name was Regina.

-

Leonardo caught up with Primo outside Primo’s father’s house. Someone, in his absence, had boarded up the windows. It hadn’t stopped the roof from sagging, but Primo had been called about that before, and still had the same reaction: let it sag. Let it rot. Everything that had been his in it was gone anyway, except the blood in the carpet.

“Are you staying long?”

Leonardo’s hair had been going grey ever since Primo had known him, one of those rare, traceable lines all the way back to some ancestor who had generated it; Leonardo’s father had begun to grey in his teens, and so had his grandfather. None of them had ever gone bald, though one had lost a hand and the other had keeled over dead one day when Leonardo had been seventeen years old.

Primo had always envied him the ease of that story. “I’m in Napoli for the season.”

“Does the director know you’re smoking?”

Primo smirked at him. “I’m just here to get some records.”

“Here?” Leonardo pointed his slowly-softening chin at the ruin-in-progress that was Primo’s inheritance.

“Of course not.”

“Regina would like to see you. And Francesco, too.”

Primo didn’t bother to remind him that Francesco was at best seven years old, and wouldn’t notice either way. “I’m not going to sing.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

-

Primo had been a choirboy for as long as he could remember. It was something of a mystery how it had happened in the first place, a nebulous sort of beginning that was buried in the far reaches of his mind, like how he knew which notes were which on the organ despite never having played it, the way he knew where certain birds roosted, or what bad wine smelled like. The church was just a building he was allowed to use for the price of his voice, somewhere to go when it rained that wasn’t high in the mountains.

Primo came and went from the church at his will, and Father Marco certainly wouldn’t have grounds to object.

Father Marco was still called “The Spaniard” even though his grandmother was the only person in his family who had been from Spain. He’d gone away and come back, and then he’d taken over the church that had been his uncle’s. It was something of an open secret that his uncle had likely been his father, but none of this was particularly shocking to Primo, who had seen him with his priestly robes up around his hips fucking Mariana, the baker’s wife, in the rectory. Primo had observed with a sort of clinical detachment that settled on him sometimes that The Spaniard had very hairy ankles, and then had just stood there until Mariana noticed him with an absolutely almighty shriek.

After that, Primo got free sweets at the bakery whenever she was behind the counter, a nervous smile with the packet and an admonishment that he ought to eat more, and a kind of unexpected masculine solidarity from the priest that he neither wanted nor knew what to do with.

Still, sometimes it crept up on him, the idea that it was a useful connection to have, that a secret held between three people was exponentially more dangerous than a tryst between two.

Marco found him on a Friday night, after everyone who’d had an urge to confess was long gone, disappearing into the bar or the brothel three towns away, where there were more than two roads and there was a glimpse of the sea out of the windows.

Primo was sitting at the organ, playing the starting note for the melody he had yet to perfect his intonation on, a slow, mournful slide low in his chest, a range which was new to him, open and deep and a little bit frightening.

“Oh, Primo, it’s just you.” Father Marco had a nice voice, perfectly serviceable for what he did with it; sermons and liturgy, the kind of gentle coercion of belief which allowed him to pretend he could absolve anyone of their sins, the occasional heartfelt hymn in the morning. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing. Would you like to learn to play the organ? I’m sure Signora Mattarese would love to teach you.”

Primo took his hands off the keys. “No. It’s nothing.”

“Have you eaten?”

Primo often wondered what the genesis of this obsession people had was, this idea that feeding him would somehow remove the fact of what Primo was from their minds for a time. He wasn’t quite an orphan, since he ostensibly lived with Salvatore now, whose silent, vicious wife had so internalised her failure to give her husband legitimate children that she rarely said a word to anyone, bustling about the village with her chin up and her lips pinched shut. She fed Primo, too, but didn’t speak to him, hardly seemed to notice him, otherwise.

“Hold this note for me,” Primo said, placing his finger on the key, a low, rumbling exhale rattling out of the pipes.

Father Marco sat down next to him, his robes always smelling sepulchral, stone and dust and wetness, despite the discreet pomade he used in his very black hair. “This one?”

Primo nodded, not moving over. Father Marco pressed the key again, the air vibrating with the sound, a hum Primo tried to match, to inculcate into the new muscle of his broader chest.

“You could use the piano in the rectory,” Father Marco suggested, as though Primo’s discovery of his affair hadn’t been a direct product of that same idea.

“It’s out of tune,” Primo pointed out. “Is she good?”

“What?”

Primo could feel him stiffen, arm-to-arm, cloth-to-cloth. “Mariana.”

“Primo… what you saw, it should never have happened. God--”

“I’m not asking about God.” Primo had decided a long time ago that God was at best a concept for people to hang their guilt on, a sort of coat rack for basic indecency, and that didn’t matter very much how people claimed to experience iit or believe in it. His own father had been a believer, supposedly, a person whose cross and saints Primo now wore, in addition to the ones bestowed upon him at his unremembered baptism, presumably by Salvatore’s hands. “I’m asking what sex feels like.”

“Is there a girl?”

 _There’s an aria,_ Primo thought, angered by the question for no reason he could fathom. _There’s a romantic line, a phrase I don’t understand, a feeling._ “Yes,” he lied, thinking of Don José, moved to fits by a woman who didn’t want him.

“Fickle creatures,” said the priest, as though he wasn’t one himself. “Complicated.”

“I’ll keep my mouth shut,” Primo said, “but not for nothing.”

-

Primo discovered there was nothing complicated about the family business in the form of several thousand Lira of the church’s funds, bundled into the rusting wires of the upright piano in the rectory, where nobody ever looked.

-

Regina started calling Leonardo _Leo_ and he didn’t object.

Primo overheard it for the first time when Leonardo let her drop him off at Salvatore’s house, and Primo heard it like a jangle of strange bells, the way the shortened name fell from her lips, fond, soft, familiar.

Primo was knee-deep in the loose hay left over from the rest which had been put in the loft above the barn for winter storage.

There was no sense in wasting the remnants, Salvatore said, and shoved a pitchfork back into Primo’s itching hands. His forearms were already pebbled with hives from the rough edges of the bales, and his throat felt rough, dusted over.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Leonardo asked Primo, when he saw him.

“Putting the hay away,” Primo said, though it was so obvious that it came out scathing, as acidic as it felt. “Obviously.”

“Where’s Dante? Isn’t his father meant to lay in the feed for the animals?”

Primo didn’t have the answers to either of those questions, though the presence or absence of Dante was never of any great concern to him. Dante danced around Primo as though Primo were a maypole, angling for favour with Salvatore by decorating entirely the wrong tree. Wherever Dante was, he wasn’t here, to foist the unpleasant work on. “I don’t know, _Leo._ go ask Salvatore. He’s inside, fondling his goats.”

Leonardo almost ruffled his hair. Primo watched him stop, the hand lifted, then dropped. “Don’t call me that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not my name.”

“She’s pretty. Salvatore says she can’t have children. That you should do better.”

“She’s pregnant,” Leonardo said, sotto voce, before he kicked a pile of loose hay in Primo’s face for him to dodge, the unexpected violence of him always something caught out of the corner of Primo’s eye, until now.

Primo got a mouthful of dust and chaff before he managed to spit it out, but it stayed between his teeth, scratching his tongue, and for a day, he was hoarse.

-

Primo had his father’s car, buried under a tarp in the collapsing woodshed behind his house.

He dug it out and filled it, when Salvatore was out one night, three towns over.

By the time Primo had driven it over to Leonardo’s house he had half a plan and a lighter, but it took until he was parked outside with the headlights off for him to truly think what he was doing.

Curses always had a way of finding their true victim, in the opera.

But then again, this was just Calabria, and victimhood fell on the weak and the delusional, not anyone else.

It was easier to fill Leonardo’s petrol tank with water than it was to restrain himself from setting it on fire, and this way was slower, quieter, and would do just as much damage, in the end.

The joke was the matchstick house he made on the bonnet with a little pile of hay, destined to blow away before Leonardo saw it. That was fine. Maybe he’d see the traces, and know, but even if he didn’t, he’d know when his engine started bucking itself off its mounts trying to burn nothing for fuel.

Maybe he’d be lucky and just grind to a halt on the road. Maybe he wouldn’t, and it would run away from him somewhere worse.

-

Primo had stopped going to school the instant he had discovered he could, so Dante had done the same.

In Dante’s case it had been a moot point, though he had other skills. He was nearly as good a shot as Primo with a rifle, though he was utterly hopeless when it came to the patience required for hunting, and he had started to take on a kind of animal stink himself that Primo wondered at, sometimes. There was nothing unusual about it, except that Dante was only a year younger than Primo, and already sprouting in strange directions.

Dante’s voice had dropped like a stone at fifteen, but then had arrested itself halfway down, culminating in a tragicomic little baritone, which had a tendency to skip octaves when he was excited.

He followed Primo into the serra one afternoon, when the air was thick and blue with heat, and Primo felt the itch beneath his skin which he never quite knew what to do with, a prickling, terrible heaviness which woke him up at night sometimes, erect and shivering.

He didn’t want company, but Dante wouldn’t be swayed, so Primo retrieved his rifle from where he’d hidden it from Salvatore and decided that if he was feeling slow and stagnant, so were the rabbits.

They were near one of the summits Primo knew to have good gullies for game when Dante --who hadn’t stopped chattering once, even when they had been climbing on their hands and toes, rifles slung across their backs-- asked him a question.

“So, when are you leaving?”

“Who says I’m leaving?”

Dante shrugged shiftily around his satchel strap, extracting a stinking sausage and a skinning knife, offering both to Primo. “Everyone.”

“I don’t want that. Eat it yourself.”

Dante took that as an invitation and sat down on a rock, blazing sun bouncing off his bare, sturdy little shoulders. “You should go, though.”

Primo had nothing to say to that, so he didn’t give Dante a second glance, swinging his rifle off his back to check it for dust. It jammed, sometimes. Primo supposed it was old, and had its faults, like any machine left uncared for. His father hadn’t bothered with it, much. He’d preferred the snub-nosed pistols Salvatore had claimed as soon as he’d disappeared. They were less accurate, and much louder, and Primo had shot a crow with one once, to see what it would feel like. The gun had kicked back into his hand, stung his palm like catching a rock, and he had almost tasted the spray of feathers which had been all that was left of the bird.

“Hey, did you hear me?” Dante asked, his mouth full. “I said you should go.”

“You have opinions now?”

“I’m just saying,” Dante continued, in his haphazard way, “Leonardo wants to kill you for what you did to his car. It’s still in the ditch, down by Vincenzo’s pastures. Regina had to go to the doctor or something. He told my father he was looking for you, but you didn’t go to church yesterday.”

Primo forced his hands to keep moving, alight with something that was neither satisfaction nor fear. It was something like vindication, but lacking the vicious joy he’d been hoping for. “I was hunting.”

“Sure. What did you do to it, anyway?”

“How does he know it was me?”

“Oh,” Dante said, as though the possibility that it hadn’t been Primo’s doing had never once occurred to him. “I guess because it was something only someone smart would do.”

“I think I see a rabbit,” Primo told him, and walked away.

-

Primo always had enough in his car to manage for a few days.

Salvatore’s fists weren’t as slow as anyone would think, from looking at him, but he preferred an open hand, a kind of humiliation Primo saw dispensed at will and received regularly. It didn’t hurt, but sometimes he found himself imagining the spurt of blood from the wrist he might achieve if he ever grabbed that outstretched hand and held it still, so he slept elsewhere.

He was in the mountains when Leonardo found him, flat on his back on the sweating stone floor of the cabin he’d patched enough to hold out the cold, which made it a sauna in the summers, a warm, wet shelter where his voice was liquid and elasticated, where every vibration rang off the rough stone walls and back into his body.

There was no lock on the door, and Primo hadn’t yet learned that it mattered as much to have one on the inside as on the outside.

The record was still winding when Leonardo came in, ducking under the door frame like Primo had to, to find Primo silent and still, his rifle pointed at Leonardo’s face.

“What’s wrong with you?” Leonardo asked, when neither of them moved. In the background, the vinyl crackled, notes emerging tinnily from the speaker, spreading into the walls. “I’ve never heard that one.” Leonardo had his hands up, open and slim-fingered. Primo had never looked at them before, really; Leonardo wasn’t soft, or unblooded, but his hands were smaller than Primo had realised. “Will you put the gun down?”

“No.”

“Fine.” Leonardo took a deep breath, chest expanding under the thin shirt he was wearing, sweat staining it so that it let light through, outlining the shape of his ribs. “Why did you do that?”

Primo had never been asked anything like that before; there was nothing to say about it, no words at hand to explain, just the sound of anger in his mind, the rush of blood in his ears. He shrugged.

“We thought she’d lost the baby.”

Primo breathed around the taste of copper in his mouth, the remembered shards of hay. “Did she?”

Leonardo shook his head. In the background, the record played itself out, the first side of _Rigoletto_ crackling into nothing but the sound of the mechanism beneath it. “You owe me a car.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” Primo said, pulling the lever back on the rifle, slowly, until it clicked.

Leonardo put his hands down. For an instant, Primo thought about firing. “Regina wants you to sing at the wedding,” Leonardo said. “If you tell anyone she’s pregnant I’ll kill you.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Primo said, because he couldn’t think of anything else.

“Come down tonight or Salvatore is going to send someone to look for you.”

“He doesn’t give a shit where I am.”

“No, he doesn’t. But if he has to send someone looking he’ll be worse.”

“Just say you found me, win yourself some favour.”

Leonardo looked at him for a long time, the expression in his eyes one Primo had never understood; something close to anger, but not quite. He had a sudden longing to peel back his skin and look underneath, to shake it out of him. To say _don’t fucking look at me like that._

“Primo,” Leonardo said, slowly, “win some yourself. What have you done for him? What do you bring him?” Primo’s finger tightened on the trigger. “No more of your fucking pranks.” Leonardo’s eyes skimmed the stone cabin, lingering on the dark corners, the sweltering stripes where the sun captured the motes of dust in the air, held the lingering smoke in the airless heat. “And stop smoking.”

-

Primo had gone to Rome like a beggar.

He had very little to carry, and less still to talk about, but that hadn't been why he was there, so it didn’t matter.

He had an aunt, a kind of aunt, the sort of person whose family tree was so festooned with offspring and climbing vines that it didn’t matter very much how much blood was between them. She was from the village. That was what was important. She had a flat in Rome from a late husband and a couch which folded out, and one of Primo’s many nebulous cousins was already on it.

Primo hadn’t cared for Stefano as a child and didn't think much of him then, with his watery eyes and watery nose and the hint of the moustache he was trying to grow shadowing his indistinct upper lip.

“How’s university?” Primo tried, exactly once.

Stefano had gaped at him. “Primo? What are you doing here?”

“None of your business,” he’d said, and left.

-

“Well, you’ll have to audition,” the secretary at the conservatory said. He had been shunted off to three or four different anonymous offices tucked into the corners and crevices of the grand palazzo it had once been, until someone had actually looked at him. “You do have a repertoire prepared, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Primo had lied. “When will I have to do that?”

She had handed him a packet of forms and notes, frowning with something that was not quite pity on her face, a humiliating sort of fondness he felt like a slap. “Where are you from?”

“Catanzaro.” Not even close, but what would she know?

“Such a beautiful town, I hear.”

He’d felt his patience slipping along with his need for a cigarette building, a kind of itch beneath his skin which he would have solved anywhere else with a rifle, a long, awful slog into the forest.

She cleared her throat. “The next intake is in eight weeks,” she told him. “Will you be staying in Rome?”

-

It wasn’t so difficult to find a place to drink in Rome as it was at home. Here, there were bars and cafés on every corner, and nobody knew his name or what he was doing there, or where he should have been, if such a place existed.

He could have been anyone.

He posted up at a bar near the conservatory with a cigarette and a whiskey. There was something flagrant about it, the smoke-and-peat tastes, the way nobody looked at him twice, the way it was easy to put his foot up on his bag and read the material he’d been pitifully given, as though he needed his hands held.

He clenched his teeth around the filter and opened the cover on the packet, reading the schedule and requirements, the dizzying list of things he didn’t have names for.

“Santa Cecilia?” said a voice to his right, male and light, a carefully modulated contralto.

Primo looked up, and said nothing.

He wasn’t much older than Primo, if he had to guess; twenty or so, maybe. Slender and not very tall, and he had a smile on his soft face that Primo didn’t know what to do with. Like he wanted something.

“I’m a cellist,” said the contralto, his sandy hair falling into his eyes, shielding them from the sun streaming over the tables on the street, until he pushed it back. “Can I sit?”

There were plenty of free tables. “What do you want?”

“I wouldn’t mind a cigarette.”

Wordlessly, Primo handed him one. Their fingers brushed, a hint of rough skin, shockingly at odds with his appearance, as his fingertips scraped Primo’s knuckles.

“Thank you. Can you light it?”

Primo had stolen the Zippo from his father’s things, before Salvatore had arrived to claim them. And Primo with them. He flicked it open, the motion practiced and practiced again, until the sound was just right, the snap and hiss of metal and flint making flame. The cigarette caught. The cellist sat down. “What’s your name?”

Primo could have told him anything. Instead, he just smiled, inhaling, exhaling, feeling the burn in his lungs, the high arches of his nose, the open space of his sinuses. “You’re at Santa Cecilia?”

“Two years in the autumn.”

It was only spring, the summer entry calls seemed very distant. “Tell me about it.”

-

His name was Federico, and he was a Roman through and through.

He had a Roman accent, a Roman flat, tiled floors and tall windows, and a little plaque hung on the wall, terracotta, of two wolves devouring each other.

“My mother’s,” Federico said, negligently, dropping the keys on the floor, kicking the door shut behind them, leaning back against it. “She despairs of me.”

“That must be nice,” Primo said, and kissed him because there was nothing else he could think of to do, harsh and a little bit strange; Federico had no hair on his cheeks, smelled of nothing but soap and clean clothes and the soot of the city. Not the cigarettes and wool smell of everyone Primo had ever known, the lingering hints of cold river water or dirt, or the way sweat tasted after it had rolled down a slope of skin, collecting dust.

Federico made a pleased noise, a sound against Primo’s lips, and grabbed a fistful of his hair.

Primo froze, and then, unfroze himself.

It was a hand, and it was hair.

Sometimes, talent was something relentlessly pursued, practiced and perfected. Sometimes, it was a flood of something unnamable, a rush of blood, a body discovering something it could do.

Sometimes, it was knowing instinctively that softness was not necessarily gentle, and that there were many ways to find a place to stay, some much easier than others.

Sex was an animal thing like any other, it turned out; the ways he’d observed it before seemed even truer after he’d done it himself. Maybe desire mattered, in the first rush of it, but afterwards it hardly mattered at all.

He had wanted so viciously. He still did, unchanged by his new state. Want was different. Want was eternal, something no brief fuck would ever touch.

In a way, that was a relief.

-

“So you’re Calabrese,” Federico asked him, running a fingertip over Primo’s spine. “I thought they only played pan pipes in Calabria. For the goats.”

Primo thought of the sound the wind made in the winter, when it screamed through the cracks in all the windows, and the heavy, insectile chorus of late summer, when the nights were louder than the days.

“That’s why we sing,” he said, as though it were a joke.

Federico laughed, stroking him, with one of his strange, hard fingertips. “You’ll be a hit,” he offered. “Do you want one?” Maybe it was the dialect, or the pressure of a hand against his lower back, but Primo didn’t know what the question meant until Federico rolled over and retrieved something from the nightstand, a tiny ceramic vial, and poured out a generous measure onto his upturned wrist. “A welcome gift.”

He snorted a pinch of it, then extended his skin to Primo.

It felt like burning, the lack of smell a shock for an instant before the acidity of it cracked across the back of his tongue.

It did feel like being hit, in the faint aftertaste of blood and the flood of euphoria, after.

“You never told me your name.”

“Hm?”

“Very mysterious, aren’t you?”

“Primo,” he said, mastering the rush of whatever he’d snorted, blinking away the way all the light in the room had sharpened. “Satisfied?”

“Oh, very,” Federico said, waving a negligent, elegant hand above their heads. “ _Primo Uomo._ Suits you.”

-

The strike ended, and the theatre reopened for rehearsals, and Primo showed up for the first dress run with mud on his boots and a rasp in his throat from the open windows of the car on the drive back, the cold wind searing his lungs enough to keep him wide awake.

The costumer took one look at him and rolled her eyes, stroking her thumb over the ragged edges of his moustache as though it were hers to touch, a quirk of the theatre he’d never managed to find less than insulting. His lip curled, silently.

“Well, what do you want me to do with it?” she asked, exasperated. “Just leave it? It doesn’t suit the role.”

“So?”

“Fine, go,” she muttered, fussing with his belt, the way the facsimile of Ancient Greek dress fell on him. “Don’t lose any more weight.”

There were mirrors everywhere, backstage, crowded with choralists doing their own makeup, with stage-hands and prop managers shooing people out of the way as they passed, with the wide variety of strange objects theatres collected.

He had a dressing room, but sometimes, before a performance, he came out and watched the chaos, the jostling, the way people moved around each other.

He went back to his dressing room to wait, because he knew it wouldn’t be long.

“So, you’re back,” the director said, wearily, when Primo was pouring himself a glass of warm water, disgusting but necessary. “Can you sing?”

“When can I not?”

“You look like shit.”

Primo couldn’t have said the same for him; he always looked glossy, the way people who had never had to know what hunger felt like looked glossy; younger than he probably was, a kind of conscious masculinity to him which leaked out around him in waves of insecurity. He was blonde, which Primo had always found vaguely upsetting, a Milanese who thought anything south of home was the countryside and who had snorted enough cocaine off Primo’s ass that he thought maybe he ought to charge him for rent as well as product. “It’s in my car, if that’s what you’re after.”

His name was Paolo, some distant scion of old nobility.

“I don’t understand you,” Paolo said, as he periodically did, edging closer. “You just disappear? This could make your career and you just _fuck off_ for _days_?”

“You think you’ll make my career, do you?” Primo ached for a cigarette, instead of the viscous slide of warmth down his throat. “You?”

Paolo just looked at him, his glossy blue eyes uncomprehending. “This is a big opportunity for us.”

Primo smirked at him. “Us?” The flowers had rotted away on his dressing table, pollen and petals laying in a deconstructed heap on the cracked vinyl. “Us.” He dragged a finger through the orange residue, wondering at the little rhythm of it, the chorus they’d settled into, call and response. Primo beckoned him closer, until he was near enough to touch. He swiped a line of sticky pollen across Paolo’s forehead, like a priest, a little bright cross standing out against his skin. “What _us_? I’m the one who’s going to fucking sing. Go get your little applause, bow in front of the orchestra, tell them all what a genius you are. You didn’t cast me, did you?”

“Primo--”

“Did you?”

Paolo shook his round head, weakened, soft.

“So what _us_?” Primo grinned at him, close enough to see his own teeth reflected in Paolo’s eyes. “You know who put me on that stage? I did. Get the fuck out.”

Primo had learned very early in Rome: nobody but him knew what he was. Only he was the master of his body. There was value in that, somehow; there was power in that kind of violence, too.

-

“There must be honesty in opera, Primo.”

“It’s a performance.”

“The very best performers leave themselves in their roles, boy. No falsehood is ever as good as a half-truth. You understand?”

Primo understood plenty of things this woman sitting at a piano in a stuffy, poorly-renovated practice room would never have cause to know.

She took her hands off the keys, looked away from the score, and squinted at him. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not a prince, am I?”

“Aren’t you? You look like one.” She put her hands back, making tiny whispers on the ivory. “Now. Again. Here, this line. Be a prince.”

He had never auditioned for anything in his life, before the summer. Nothing had ever felt entirely as strange as _asking_ for something, and in the end, getting it.

She pointed at a note he couldn’t read.

“Play it,” he said, trying to hold himself still.

She tapped the key, impatient, and he kept it in his mind, and sang the line, knowing it was rigid, that nothing about it was right except the string of melody. Not the breath or the phrasing, not the rigidity of his ribs, the ladders holding him up and holding him still.

“What’s the matter with you today?” she asked, turning away from the score. “You always come in ready to work.”

“I don’t like it,” Primo blurted, hating himself immediately for the confession, any confession at all.

“Who cares what you like?” she demanded. “You want to sing? Sell it. Tell me you’re a prince, and you adore your father, show me you’re enraptured with the idea of love. You’ve never sung anything you don’t like?”

Primo had never sung anything he’d been asked to put himself into, like this. Nothing which scratched at him, nothing which had the words _il padre adorato_ scraping into the back of his throat. There were mirrors in all the practice rooms; mirrors for the shapes mouths made, mirrors to catch the clouds of breath, mirrors to capture gesture and poise and presentation. Mirrors to smash, to turn away from.

“You won’t keep getting away with it,” she said to his back, Signora Rosa in her even, modulated, ageing voice. “You’ll have to learn to read it eventually. I can teach you. That’s what I’m here for.”

Primo glared at her, unsure why it felt like a slap, the offer of something so basic, as though he needed her help. “What do you want me to say?”

“Primo. Get out of my room until you’re ready to work. Go for a walk.”

“Where?” he snapped, “this entire fucking place is stones.”

Something in her face softened, and that was unbearable. He left, without waiting for an answer.

She caught up with him in the hallway, a short, round woman of middle years, nothing extraordinary about her except her hands, wide and spider-like, octaves and octaves, years and years of playing the same notes. She put a hand on his broadening chest, and looked up at him, sure he was someone she could touch. “Nobody,” she said, very calmly, “wants talent like you to fail. Do you understand? Tell me you understand.”

“I’m not going to fail.”

“You’re very young,” she said, mercilessly kind. “Younger than we usually take, I think. Remember that, when you feel like you’re not meant to be here.”

He almost laughed. It was a near thing, a caught breath. _Meant to be._ That was as meaningless as a summer shower, a brief shot of cloud over the sun. He stepped around her hand, suddenly amused. Of course it wasn’t meant to be. He’d done it to himself.

-

Federico, it turned out, had a little glimmer of notoriety to him.

Primo should have known it from how they met, the brazen gleam in his light brown eyes, the way he’d looked Primo up and down one soupy Roman morning and said _you’re hardly even seventeen, are you?_ as though Primo had somehow failed an insignificant but funny test.

“How old did you think I was?”

“Please, I didn’t care,” Federico said, flicking a little bit of blood off his left nostril with a short, neat fingernail. “I didn’t think you’d be around for long and, well, look at you. I could hardly ignore you.”

Primo stretched back against the headboard, accepted the streak of powder Federico offered him with a gasp and a jolt as it settled. “What gave me away?”

Federico rolled onto his back, looking up at Primo with his long, strong hand draped backwards over his leg, the weight of it warm and bony against his skin. “You’ve grown,” he said, simply, tapping his knuckles into the slack muscle of Primo’s thigh. “Haven’t you?”

Primo hadn’t noticed. He had only felt a deepening, an elastication of something barely perceptible, a resonance building in his chest.

“You need new shirts,” Federico told him. “Unless you want to keep outgrowing them.”

He had a powerfully irritating way of winking when he thought he was being funny, and he stole Primo’s cigarettes any time he saw them. He had let his mother walk in on them naked once, when Primo had been leaving, her perfectly styled hair and generous mouth so reminiscent of her fey and difficult son that Primo had paused in the act of scrambling for his trousers, struck by the likeness of them.

He had a father who Federico pointed out on the news sometimes when there were interesting scandals in parliament, who had a wife and four other children.

Federico had a cello he adored with as much of him as seemed capable of adoration without some kind of bribe. He kept the cash he collected from everyone he supplied with cocaine in an alabaster lamp hollowed out to look like a Greek vase, and Primo wondered often whether it mattered to him at all, the overflowing cup of his life.

Primo heard him practice every morning that he unstuck himself from Federico’s infrequently changed sheets, and thought that maybe it did sometimes, but only when he thought he was playing.

Federico snapped his fingers, the crack of it loud to Primo’s cocaine-sensitive ears. “Did you hear me?”

Primo lit a cigarette and took a drag, then handed it to him. Federico never told him not to smoke. “You said I need new shirts.”

Federico reached into the lamp, bestowing on Primo a shower of bills, crumpled and misshapen from being held in sweating hands. “I owe you for the chamber music connection, don’t I?”

Primo might have mentioned it, in passing, that a cellist who was accompanying a soprano Primo shared a practice room with had broken a wrist on a Vespa. It was just what people did; a vacancy here, an audition there, or in Primo’s case, as many funerals as there were Sundays, his deeply buried liturgical repertoire a surprisingly rare commodity.

“I know a tailor.”

Primo took his cigarette back. “You’ve fucked a tailor, you mean.”

“Same thing,” Federico said, flexing his wrists, extending his fingers, and abruptly throwing himself off the bed, high enough to practice in an instant.

-

The winter before Primo left, the snow was so thick in the mountains that it was blinding to look at them, peaks of the trees barely pushing out of their coating, faint green stubble against the blankness of the frozen peaks.

In the village, it piled up in doorways and blocked the road, set the old people complaining about their joints, and knocked out the electricity for a week and a half while someone in the capital decided if it was worth fixing, and who’d pay.

Primo was lighting the fire again after it had gone out overnight when his aunt came downstairs, bundled into a robe so thick she looked vaguely comical, her pointed face sticking out of the top and her gnarled hands holding it closed at the neck. They had settled into a kind of silent loathing of each other that he had never tried to change. She’d be dead soon, if the rumours were true, and his attachment to her was situational. They occupied a portion of the same space out of similar obligation.

She sighed at the crackling fire, something tight in her face easing slightly at the hint of warmth. “We used to call this witch weather,” she said, as though she had ever bothered to speak to him beyond necessity before. “When I was a girl.”

Primo stared at the nascent flames, willing them to catch faster, so he could go.

“I liked your mother,” Valentina said, quietly. “Never understood why she bothered with your idiot father. Maybe everyone wants to leave, sometimes. Who knows.” She picked her stiff way over to the gas stove and lit it, settling the kettle full of meltwater over the single ring. The taps were frozen, but there was plenty of snow.

“What was she like?” Primo hardly registered that he’d let the words slip out, the trembling darkness of the kitchen the only thing that allowed it. Murk and flame, and the pale reflection off the snow through the windows.

“You look just like her.”

Primo wanted to stick his fingers right into the fireplace, yank more flame out of the cold logs.

“Anyone ever tell you she was Greek?”

“No.”

“Well, she was. One of those little villages down near Reggio Calabria. The real kind of Griko, not the shit you all use for your fucking codes.”

The kettle boiled slowly, a ripple of water the only sound beyond the small hiss of the stove and the sluggish crackle of kindling slowly building heat. Primo had no questions left to ask. Why bother chasing the dead, when they’d been gone nearly as long as they’d been alive? There was nothing in him which called for recognition of who’d birthed him. She was a fact in the distance, a person who had hardly existed. He already had everything she’d given him.

“She was a whore,” Valentina said, as though it carried equal weight to anything else she’d said. “Or at least, that’s what everyone said. Used to dance.”

The kettle boiled, finally, steam shooting out of its whistle, provoking a shout from upstairs, Salvatore enraged at the disturbance of his sleep. Valentina picked it up, using both hands, her birdlike frame seeming bowed by the insignificant weight until Primo took it, only coming close enough to grab the handle.

Valentina waved her fingers at the coffee can, pain creasing across her face. Maybe Primo did know what this was, in the end. Confession, of a kind. A sharing of secrets before they went to the grave.

Primo made the coffee for Valentina to take up.

She watched him do it, standing like a little scarecrow on the freezing flagstones, a frail Fury with bright, coal-stone eyes. “Don’t sing at my funeral, boy,” she said, in the end, when he’d finished. “I don’t want any witchery following me to heaven.”

“That’s where you think you’re going?”

She frowned at him, nearly-invisible lips trembling, and then, abruptly, resumed her lifetime of silence, closing her mouth over the fight they could have had, the snap and hiss of insult.

She went upstairs without another word, and by nightfall she was dead.

-

By mid-morning the sun had come out, clear and freezing, hanging low over the peaks.

Primo looked up from breaking ice off the gutters when the bells rang.

Salvatore was in the barn, communing with his animals, so for once, Primo knew it couldn’t have been his doing. There was a moment of perfect stillness, only the sound bouncing off the snow, a great, wide echo. For a moment, the world felt huge.

And then Salvatore emerged from the barn doors and rattled the bottom of the ladder Primo was perched on, shouting, and the feeling shattered away like glass.

-

Leonardo was in the town square with The Spaniard, the butcher, and Mariana, who was weeping into a scarf, tears glistening on her red cheeks like the Madonna, inconsolable with something too muffled by her cowl to make out.

Salvatore marched over, nearly as wide as he was tall in his winter coat, cutting through the gathering crowd like a stocky plough, all muscle and force.

Leonardo bent to speak to him, but it was Primo whose eyes he caught, who was standing with his back to the church wall, aching for a cigarette.

Mariana’s son hadn’t come home. Primo knew him, vaguely, the way everyone knew whose children were whose, in the little pack they ran in around the village. She had two, a boy and a girl, the lucky kind of twins.

They were twelve or so, maybe, if Primo recalled correctly. He usually did. They weren’t particularly interesting. They were probably Father Marco’s, judging from their thick, black hair, and the conspicuous thinning brown of the baker’s remaining strands.

Marco himself was trying for an air of holy detachment, but Primo had seen him two days a week his entire life, and thought maybe he was betraying himself by the way he had pulled Mariana close and then let her go, guiltily stroking his beard instead. There was something fascinating about it, the way everything seemed pulled-together, purse strings cinched closed around them all, the little knot of them, all tied in.

_Please. Please find him, I’m begging you. I’m begging you._

The words filtered through the chatter, the noise of feet on the cobbles, the milling, muttering crowd of men.

Dante appeared with his father, his wiry hair sticking out under his knitted cap, and he made a beeline for Primo with his chest puffed out, steaming breath from his nostrils. “We’ll find him, eh?” he said, self-importantly.

Dante didn’t have the sense God gave to ferrets, but Leonardo had looked at Primo, too.

-

Later, Primo wouldn’t remember when it was, exactly.

It was winter; all the days ran together. Snow months.

There was always life in the mountains. Tracks where birds had landed, burrows, goat tracks. Primo knew every cave and cabin and abandoned homestead for miles, but so did a lot of people.

In the summer, the heat made everything volatile, heavy, moveable.

In the winter, things were frozen, which was different. Frozen things snapped, broke into fragments. Frozen blood from a scrape or a nosebleed splattered into the snow and stayed there, hard and brown, hot enough to melt into the surface for a second before it stopped.

Leonardo cracked the heel of his boot into it before Primo could shove him out of the way.

They had outpaced the others, spreading out around the town, but somehow Leonardo had contrived to stay with Primo. It felt supervisory, somehow, but Primo preferred it to the alternative, which was lagging at Salvatore’s heels, or worse, driving him up the mountain roads so he could watch, like a little king on a mobile throne.

Primo registered that Leonardo was speaking, but for a moment it didn’t matter.

They were near a ravine he knew well, a sudden drop once created by a river which had become a stream, which was now a trickle through a deep crevice of bare rock, with a pool at the bottom. There were always fish there, a place in the summer where it was very quiet, and the rocks were very smooth.

There was a cave beneath the overhang, a cool, slippery place which was out of the sun and out of the wind.

 _Why would anyone come this far in the winter?_ Leonardo was asking, speaking to the air. _Was he lost?_

It hadn’t snowed since the night before. Instead, everything was ice, clear and treacherous. Animals broke their legs in this weather. People lost their way in the blankness of it. In the end, there was no reason to be found for any of it. Sometimes, things just happened.

“Go find a car,” Primo told him, looking at what might have been a footprint, a glazed patch of scraped rock, where the ice was rippled and thin.

Leonardo glared at him. “Why?”

Primo pointed at the cave, the crack in the rocks. “Because he’s in there.”

Leonardo rushed in before Primo could mention the blood, and came out again, minutes later, white-faced. He lit a cigarette, shaking. He was always someone who looked warm, like he had been made for summers. Even with steam rising off his shoulders from the damp wool of his coat he looked out of place in the season. He exhaled, a cloud of smoke and condensation wreathing his paled skin. “Jesus fucking Christ. What happened?”

Primo shrugged. “Animals hide in there when they’re injured, sometimes. There’s some old shit left from the war. Useless, mostly. It’s all rusted. Nobody told you it was haunted?”

“Well, it is now,” Leonardo said grimly, before he seemed to remember who he was with. “Primo--”

“Can I have one?”

Leonardo hesitated for a moment, before he handed Primo a lit cigarette with his shaking hands, and sat down next to him. “Why _now_?”

“Ask him,” Primo said, and exhaled, looking at the uninterrupted blue of the sky, the dazzling whiteness all around them. “I don’t fucking know. Trying to impress someone?” Primo could have given Leonardo his own voice, why he’d have done something like this, wander into the whiteness and freeze to death, or slowly bleed out, like a wounded animal, but then again, Primo wouldn’t have done it. It was stupid; a quick chance for survival over a better chance of being where someone might find you, he knew where he’d choose.

“I feel like there should be more,” Leonardo admitted.

“More what?”

“I don’t know,” Leonardo said, pulled open, cracked. “Just more than this.”

“In operas there’s a chorus,” Primo said, grinding out the rest of the cigarette on the rock, listening to it hiss as it melted the ice around it. “I’m going to go find a car.”

Leonardo caught his wrist. “Primo. At least we found him. It does matter.”

Primo shook out of his grip and went to find the nearest car, the quiet shattered by the slipping feet and arguing voices, and the whiteness of the gully trampled over until it was brown again, sludged into freezing mud by many sets of feet, and if anyone asked, Primo said Leonardo had found him, and to ask him the questions.

 _How did you do that?_ Leonardo asked him, much later, when it was dark and the keening crowd had been moved indoors, and Primo was well on his way to blind drunk, sitting on the front steps of the bar with a stolen bottle of brandy, smiling grimly to himself. There had been a chorus after all.

 _Practice,_ Primo had said, simply.

-

“You want to get out of here?”

Primo had been observing two elegant women in shawls have a fight over canapes for ten minutes, while a man in a suit with a Milanese accent was telling him about racehorses.

Primo was planning to be insensibly drunk in the near future when Federico sidled up to him with his tie askew and a streak of white negligently emblazoned on the lapel of his tuxedo and linked their arms together. “I’m stealing him,” he said, to the racehorse man. “He’s too young for you unless you’re interested in making a donation to the opera.”

Primo disentangled himself with difficulty, finding it harder to move and remain upright than it had been to just stand there and watch the drama play out over whether a certain food had fish in it. Sometimes, things in Rome were unbearably stupid, and it never seemed to quite make sense what kind of stupid they would be.

Sometimes it was being hired with a chamber group to come to a party and be hustled through the kitchen where everyone seemed intent on some replay of the Tantalus fable: _none of this is for you, though you might reach out and touch it._ Sometimes it was a night of strange, cut-together Mozart for the uninterested ears of stockbrokers with racehorses who wanted to talk about it afterwards.

Sometimes it was a ringing bacchanal of class and money all around them, opulence like Primo had never seen or touched before, and there they were, making music.

Federico dropped a little bag into Primo’s top pocket and waited.

The hit was immediate; alcohol rarely stood a chance against cocaine, and together they were a balancing act, a tiptoe between the high register and the low, stitching him in the middle.

“Much better,” Federico said, snagging two glasses of champagne off a passing tray. For him, whether he was at the party or in the party didn’t seem to matter. “Come on, you’re driving.”

Primo was in absolutely no shape to do so, but it hardly mattered. Force of will would win.

Primo had driven them there. He kept more in his car than he ever had in his room at the barracks, what everyone called the little monastic spaces for students at Santa Cecilia. Rome had filled it with parking tickets and curios and old playbills, until one day he had taken it all and burned it in the nearest open space, a ruined temple to some dead and departed god. People got mugged there all the time, he’d been told, but Primo had quietly laughed and wondered, in private, whether anyone would try it.

The car was clean under the Roman grime, and Federico turned up the radio before Primo got a chance to do it himself, cocaine cracking through him, something slow and romantic coming through the speakers. “Change it, change it,” Primo managed, searching for the other sounds the radio offered. Mourning was for funerals.

“I can’t believe you actually like this rock and roll shit.”

“Jealous because you can’t play it,” Primo guessed, accurately, from the laugh he got.

“Turn left.”

Primo had decided within months that he liked the underside of Rome more than the glittering surface. The basements and the ground floors, the places where the music rattled the walls and there was no champagne to scrape bubbles across his tongue.

Places where people sweated.

Federico disappeared into the crowd the moment they arrived, like always. Primo never wondered at it. Necessity was something he understood.

A face he knew, vaguely, sidled up to him at the bar. Ruddy, not very tall, thick shoulders. Nice mouth, he remembered. “Primo, right? What are you drinking?”

There was a woman on the stage in the corner, dancing in an outfit full of sequins, and the room was dark, murky and warm. His shirt was sticking to his back, his jacket long ago folded down over his rifle in the back of the car, which was parked over the curb at an angle, bumper almost scraping the terracotta wall.

Primo offered him the cocaine he was after and pocketed the money. He accepted the offer of a drink. He tried to remember the name, and simply couldn’t, so he gave him one, choosing from a list. _Poliuto, Canio, Werther._ “Looks a little light,” Primo guessed, fingering the fold of clammy bills. Perhaps there was a little less in the bag than there had been, but in Primo’s new experience, people could rarely tell.

 _Canio_ licked his lips. “Come on. I need it.”

“You can make it up to me,” Primo suggested.

-

There was always something reckless about being outside in Rome.

The city didn’t invite it. There was no space anywhere, all close corners and strange angles and narrow spaces between buildings, crumbling plaster at his back and in his hair, the scrape of teeth against his skin.

The sound of passing people on the next street over, a thumping echo of music through the stone.

“Put your fucking back into it,” Primo suggested, grabbing a fistful of curling hair, thick with gel and sweat. “Hurry up.”

-

There was a rule, buried in the guidelines of Santa Cecilia, that it was forbidden to undertake professional work until after matriculation. It was flouted by everyone, and tolerated by the instructors. It was the kind of insignificant obstacle thrown like a rock into the road to stop traffic, and only the smaller vehicles could get around it. Engagements at parties, small weddings, the eternal funerals Primo attended like an ancient mourner.

“I know you’re working,” Rosa said to him, on a Monday or a Tuesday, one of those days that were hangovers now, when the cold clarity of the piano and the vibration of his voice were the only amelioration available for the ache in his jaw from grinding his teeth. “I’m not going to tell you not to.”

Primo had been sitting in on her previous lesson, in the corner, marking a score.

It had never come naturally to him, the work of music that wasn’t music itself, but he had discovered through brutal exposure that while learning a score was easier than reading one by sight, everything was wider if he could do both. Sometimes there was a rhythm to it, if he let himself feel it. Sometimes he found himself sitting in on rehearsals, other courses, the eternal fullness of a half-empty theatre, occupied by sound.

Primo looked up at her, wondering where she was going with this line of interrogation.

“There’s a masterclass,” she offered, shuffling her papers. “It’s being organised for senior students, the promising ones. I want you to take it.”

“Who’s giving it?”

“Don’t get stuck, Primo,” Rosa told him, in her obliquely blunt way, _pianoforte_ buried into her. She was like a brick, on the inside. “Parties and funerals pay the bills, but that’s it.”

Parties and funerals weren’t what paid his bills, but he suspected Rosa didn’t need to be told that, and didn’t particularly care. “Who’s giving it?”

“Your future rival, if you have any fucking sense. Now, stand up, if you can.”

Primo grinned at her, startled into a laugh.

“I hate that moustache,” she informed him. “Have you studied the German?” Primo had a range that would have made Wagner weep, but it wasn’t his strength, and Rosa knew it. In earlier days, it would have been a taunt. Now it was a challenge, and she threw them at him, sometimes, to see what he’d do. “I’ll be surprised if you found the time,” she said, and played the first note for him to warm up with. “Scales. Let’s see how much you’ve swallowed.”

-

As a child, Primo had been to Napoli twice.

Once for a wedding, a family affair, a capo from the Camorra marrying his daughter to a rising don from the ‘ndrine in Locri, some little seaside village that made a fortune from tourists and beach clubs. The wedding had been long, and hot, and boring, and Salvatore had kept Primo under his arm for most of it, a strange kind of peacocking which Primo had understood instinctively. There were girls of similar age at the gathering, like a menu of connections. By the end of the night Primo had been sick from wine, and had fallen asleep in the car on the way back, his overheated face pressed into the window until he had been delivered back to his father, who was in a similar state.

The second time had been to the hospital. He had been ten or so, maybe. Leonardo had taken him, finding Primo in the village after church. He’d shown up with a cigarette hanging from his lips and a sheen of sweat over his face, like he had been in a hurry. “Get in,” he’d said, fiercely. “We’re going to fucking Napoli.”

“Why?”

“It doesn’t matter. Get in.”

Primo had dug his heels in, leaning back against the church steps where he’d been catching the last of the evening sun, suspicious. “If it doesn't matter, why do I have to come?”

Leonardo had looked at him as though he hadn’t expected to be questioned. Perhaps at twenty-one he was already used to being listened to, obeyed without overt force. “I’ll explain in the car.”

“No.”

“Primo,” Leonardo started, taking a step away from the car, “come on.”

Primo had come alert, then, rocking onto his feet, crouched like a runner, waiting for the gun.

Leonardo must have seen it, because he held his hands out from his sides, ready to catch him, if he bolted. “Your father’s been shot, he’s in the hospital. Now, will you come?”

Primo relaxed in an instant, his held breath, waiting to be used, leaking out of his chest. “Oh. Is he dead yet?”

“They think he’ll live, but he wants to see you.”

“Why?”

Leonardo had stared at him. Primo remembered it, the way his wide-set eyes had narrowed, the particular frustration of the way he’d grabbed a handful of his own hair, shoving it back from his face in the evening breeze. “What kind of a question is that? Why am I negotiating with you? Get in the goddamn car. It’s duty, all right?”

Primo got in the car.

Halfway there, Primo had gotten bored of the drive, of the emptiness of sound. Leonardo’s radio was broken, only playing static and the occasional snatch of a news anchor, talking about politics. “Who shot him?”

Leonardo seemed baffled by the question, as though being interrogated by a child was the strangest thing that had ever happened to him. “He owes people money.”

“Business,” Primo said, sagely.

“No,” Leonardo had hissed, packing fury into one short syllable. “Pleasure.”

Primo hardly remembered the hospital, but he remembered the trip, the way he’d been bundled back into the car after the visit, the antiseptic smell of it all, and the way Leonardo had thrown a jacket over him on the long drive home, cursing furiously to himself about gambling away money they didn’t have once he thought Primo was asleep, venting himself, like a long, quiet scream.

-

Primo had been in Rome for a year and a half when one of the administrators at Santa Cecilia came looking for him, finding him perched in the high seats of the grand theatre the senior students were rehearsing in, the whole orchestra of them laid across the stage, the soloist from one of the other programmes warming up with them.

The tune-up was a wall of sound without a form, a nebulous, shifting cloud, familiar and anticipatory.

“Ah, Rosa was right, I owe her ten lira,” he said. He was a young man, to Primo’s eyes. Maybe thirty or so. Unremarkable and unmusical, but he clearly knew who Primo was. That was, in itself, both worrying and gratifying. “Here, this came for you. Do you not have a mailbox?”

Primo hadn’t even considered getting one. Everybody knew where he was. “Don’t need one, do I?”

“Fucking weirdo,” the administrator said. “We’re not your mailmen. This isn’t Calabria.”

“If it was, you’d have left by now.” Primo tore open the envelope, but waited, his fingers slipped inside the paper, for his audience of one to leave.

The handwriting on the envelope was painfully familiar; he’d seen it in ledgers all his life, in scribbled notes on Salvatore’s table, scrawled carefully over the sides of jars.

“Peasant,” the administrator said, with quiet vehemence, before he stomped away, disturbing the delicate outro that always followed a tuning orchestra, a subtle resolution of tension into order.

Primo unfolded the letter. It was in the idiosyncratic _Greacanico_ shorthand of his childhood, words he hadn’t used in over a year resurfacing in his mind.

_Primo, something’s come up. Call me. I’ll be at Valerio’s between 8-10 on Thursday._

There was nothing sentimental about it, no phone number attached, not even a signature. Leonardo had at least dated it, and left Primo to work out the rest. He knew the number, of course. There was only one bar in the village, everyone knew where to call.

-

“No good wishes?” Primo asked, when Leonardo picked up.

Primo was leaning against the inside of a phone booth in Trastevere, staring at a climbing vine making its way over the dilapidated sign of a pornographic cinema. Primo had been inside it once, to see what all the fuss was about. It hadn’t been anything to write home about, but it was fascinating in its own way, the performance of it, the gyrations of the various bodies. The subtle symphony of false pleasure. Maybe there was even something titillating about it, in the flagrancy of sex for the camera. He’d been more interested in the other people in the audience, men spread apart in their own rows, biting their lips, palming their cocks, communal and solitary all at once.

“Would you read them?” Leonardo asked, sharp and serious, Calabrese skating across the part of Primo’s mind which craved it, despite himself. “Someone’s missing. I need you to find him.”

Primo picked at his nails, telephone sandwiched between his ear and his shoulder. He’d brought cigarettes, but they were wet from the unexpected autumn downpours which shattered the sky in Rome sometimes, soggy in his front pocket. “Not even a _how are you doing,_ ” Primo mused aloud. “Manners, no?”

“Primo, for the love of God, shut up. This is serious.”

Primo took a breath, scent of other bodies which had preceded his in this anonymous little bubble becoming cloying. There was a peeling poster on the side of it, by the phone book, a woman with wildly painted lips blowing a kiss at him, half her face torn off. “Who?”

“Carlo Laganà.”

“From Mammola?”

Leonardo huffed. “How many Laganàs do you think we care about?”

Primo bit the end off his thumbnail where it had gotten ragged, clacking his teeth together. “It’s a common name. What’d he do?”

“Do you want to know?”

Primo had an ache in his shoulder where it was pressing into a seam in the windows, metal pane digging into his joint. It was grounding, and stupid. He should move. Everything in him wanted to move. “If you want me to find one man in fucking Rome, then yes, I want to know.”

“He took something that didn’t belong to him,” Leonardo said shortly. “More?”

“When I find him, then what?”

Leonardo was silent for a very long time, the sounds of the bar behind him louder in the silence between his breaths. If Primo tried, he could picture the old black and white television playing football, the men bent over the pool table, the way Salvatore held court once a week in the corner, with his jacket pulled over his shoulders because it wouldn’t button over his chest anymore, old wool, well-cared for, but not enough to attract attention. Everything about him sepia-toned, cigarette stains on his fingers and his big, brown glasses, and Leonardo, next to him, listening to the grievances and the granting of permissions. Accounting. Balancing the books.

“He and I need to talk,” Leonardo said, finally. “Alive is better.”

“Why me?”

“Because I want him found,” Leonardo said. “Call me when it’s done.” He exhaled hard, and Primo could imagine it, vividly, the way he smoked, how he dragged at his cigarettes, quickly, sharply, the only thing about him which betrayed what he was, if anyone was looking. “So, how’s Rome treating you?”

The tone sounded in Primo’s ear, warning him that his coin was running out. He thought of what he could have said, but in the end his impulse won. “Family is never finished,” he said, unable to contain the smirk in it, the irony. “Is that it?”

“Like in the opera, no?” Leonardo said.

“Like in the opera.” Primo repeated it, but the call had cut off before he’d had a chance to put another coin in.

Primo replaced the handset, watching the men trickle into the cinema for the evening show, furtive and shuffling, or uncaring and straight-backed. It would be winter in the mountains, soon, white and cold, but here it would be grey and rain-streaked, the soupy yellow light of Rome muted for a few months, at best. A place where people left very different tracks.

-

“--all _you_ have to do is sell it.”

Primo caught the last of the conversation when he found Federico at the cafe, the staff bustling around setting tables for dinner, Federico tucked into the corner with his cello, leaning in its case against the back wall, and Bertolini, the owner.

There was another man at the table, a pilot’s uniform jacket slung carelessly over the back of his chair.

Primo watched it happen, the slide of a packet of powder across the table, familiar and dense, and the way it was accepted.

“I take the most risk,” the pilot pointed out, though it seemed to be an old argument. He was already putting his hat back on. “Transporting that shit could get me jailed, you know.”

Primo already knew most of what was transpiring; it was old, the same way all racketeering was old. The Colombians sold it to the Sicilians, the Sicilians moved it north, with planes and ships, and sometimes even by car, heavily taxed by the Calabrians, for the use of their roads.

An expected amount of loss was almost certainly factored into the price of doing business. Credit was a faulty system.

Federico spotted Primo with a languid smile, waving him over. “Have you met our Calabrese prodigy?”

“I should be going,” the pilot said, getting up. “Evening flight.”

“I hear Colombia is nice this time of year,” Bertolini muttered, waving at his seat for Primo to take. “Calabria, eh? You’re pretty far from the homeland.”

“Not as far as I could be.” Primo smiled, kicking Federico’s legs away under the table. “Scared more of us might turn up?”

Bertolini took a long time to laugh, his burly frame looking as though it ought to have produced a booming voice, a resonance, but instead it was just a bit flat, an ordinary, unexceptional sound. Easy to ignore. Strange. “Dinner’s on the house,” he said, finally, as though placating them both. “Anything you want from the kitchen.”

Primo hooked his elbow over the back of his chair to watch him go, jerking a thumb at him as he went. “I don’t trust him.”

“What’s not to trust?” Federico lit a cigarette off the candle already burning on the table, evening turning blue around them. “Everyone gets a cut.”

Primo took the cigarette out of his fingers, claiming it. It was easier to smoke, exhaling blue clouds to match the dusk, than it was to point out that Federico was a politician’s son and socialite’s darling, and Bertolini likely wanted his clients more than anything else. Rome had two currencies, always; the Lira and the glitterati, and sometimes the value of one fluctuated, while the other never did. “I’m not hungry,” he said, finally. “We’re going to be late.”

“Fashionably. And when are you ever?”

-

The party was the usual kind. Federico played with the Baroque ensemble, the chamber singers argued over the arrangement with the amateur conductor, a Venetian with a bad stutter and a furious, aristocratic conviction of his brilliance, and by the end of the night most of the cocaine was gone, the rest of it sequestered under spare bow-strings and resin, and Primo’s waistcoat pocket.

“Stay over,” Federico murmured, drunk as soon as the playing had ended, his arm cinched around Primo’s waist in the back garden, as the night wound down and they were both blurry with competing highs. “For old time’s sake, no? You can pretend to be naive and I--”

“Mother of God, shut the fuck up.” Primo slapped him lightly, just enough to focus him, stop the slurring for a sharp little second. “Let’s go.”

-

When Primo had been very young, pleasure was a foreign concept; it came after sufficiency, after warmth and food, after navigating the chores of survival, whatever they happened to be that day.

The part of him which knew itself through hedonism was only music, the sensation of his voice, a clarion reverberance through his body like a rung bell.

Now, there was an unstoppable desire for that same sensation, but sometimes he found it in other ways. The jolting high of good cocaine, the recklessness of letting someone else take him by the back of the neck and bite down, the shameful surrender to the lusts of Rome, the great, corrupted city, with all its ravenous freedoms.

He woke up with his face pressed into Federico’s neck, wondering what was wrong.

The rest of the night came back to him in murky flashes: Another line, another drink, a pill after the fuck, to wind down. Primo hadn’t bothered. The alcohol had blunted the cocaine’s knife-sharp stab at the inside of his nose, and the thickness of his tongue had been all he’d needed to sleep it off.

It was the sound. Federico breathed, a crackling, indistinct rattle.

Primo turned him over. Not dead. Nothing to bury, nothing to burn.

There was a phone in the sitting room, a wild extravagance with an international line that Federico’s mother paid for.

Primo took what was his and called an ambulance.

He waited across the street for forty-seven minutes, wondering if they’d come out with a body or a patient. He smoked every cigarette he had left down to the filter until he had an answer, and then went back in for the cocaine.

-

Rosa tapped him on the shoulder outside Santa Cecilia, where he was smoking, the night before the master class. She walked up behind him, her particular, prosaic footsteps masked by the burble of water from the fountain he was sitting on the edge of, watching the stream of people.

Primo was rarely easy to startle. It occurred to him that she knew him far too well, if she could sneak up on him with any skill at all. He didn’t jump, but let go of her wrist as soon as he’d grabbed it, recognising her hand.

She stared at him for a moment, as though she were only just now remembering what he looked like. “Primo, are you smoking?” she asked him, as though she didn’t know perfectly well that what had once been a semi-clandestine indulgence was now an indelibly carved runnel in the earth of his body, a welcome, needed burn. “Put that thing out.”

Primo took another drag. “Callas and Corelli are smokers.”

“You’re not Callas or Corelli yet.” Rosa heaved her dignified little frame up onto the fountain next to him, surprising him for the second time. She abruptly reminded him of the nuns who had occasionally come to town on missions of one kind or another, angling for the souls of people who had either decided long ago that their kind of salvation was the sort offered by their loyalty to family and blood, or the rest of them, too frightened to step out from under the shadow. They came, they fed some children, they left. “I heard about your friend.”

“What friend?”

Rosa glared at him. “I don’t lie to you, you don’t lie to me. There are no lies in opera. Hopefully Switzerland will do him some good. Clean air, and nobody’s more boring than the Swiss. Clears the mind.”

Primo snorted smoke out of his nose before he could stop himself. He offered her a cigarette from the box. She sighed, and took it. He lit it with a click of his lighter, and she watched him carefully, her broad, intelligent face so deeply un-beautiful that it almost turned a full circle and came back, like a sort of optical illusion. She was looking at his hands, his scraped knuckles where he had forced the latch on Federico’s door after the medics had left and the little cruciate scar on the inside of his right middle finger, hidden between digits.

“Can I tell you something?” she asked him, as though if he said _no_ she would leave him alone, and walk off.

He shrugged, curious, despite himself.

“I don’t give a shit what you are, queer, a crook, whatever,” she said, without a hint of cruelty. “I’m going to say this once, because you deserve to hear it, and then you can go back to pretending I’m some funny auntie you left behind in the mountains, if you want. I don’t care, as long as you show up.” She took a drag on her cigarette, coughed, and gave it back to him. “You have a tremendous instrument. Voices like yours don’t come along often. Most people can sing, but not very many of them can bring something to life like that, out of nothing. Not everybody has the instinct for it, the blood. When we teach, if we’re lucky, we get two or three of you, in a career.” She tapped him on the chest, a quick rap of strong fingers, and he was too tense to stop her, perched on the edge of the fountain with a kind of rising dread in his throat that made him furious, a boiling, horrible urge to shove her away. “You’ll be at the mercy of it your whole life,” Rosa continued, implacably. “It can be a curse, too, to have and hold and be something you can’t explain. People will ask you to explain it.”

Nobody had ever asked him to explain it, not once, but he couldn’t find the words to refute her, lips trapped in a silent snarl.

Rosa stared right back at him, unmoved. “You get by here however it is you get by. I don’t want to know. But remember this: here, in Rome, we’re third tier. Once we were grand, and now we’re not. That’s just how history works. If you want more than this, the world will hear you, but first you have to make it listen. Do you understand?”

“You’re fucking crazy,” Primo muttered, smoking her rejected cigarette.

“Yes, and so are you,” she said, “or we wouldn’t be musicians.” She hopped off the fountain, slapped him on the thigh and said, with all the seriousness she had in her stout frame, “if you don’t show up tomorrow I’ll ruin you myself. They’ll find pieces of you in the Tiber.”

Primo wanted to laugh, almost. A painful croak emerged out of his throat, a kind of involuntary manifestation of the fury under his skin, the insult, the way he wanted to lunge at her, and shake loose everything she thought she knew about him. “Easier to feed a body to pigs,” he said, “or leave it for scavengers.”

“ _Now, gods,_ ” she recited, something he half-remembered, a vague itch of recognition at the back of his mind, her intonation deadly serious, playfully bleak, “ _stand up for bastards._ ”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Learn your classics is what it means, Primo.” She lifted a hand, as though to touch him, then abruptly decided not to, gathering her dignity around her instead. “I hope you show up.”

He watched her go, waiting until she was out of sight before he plunged a hand into the water, smacking away the calm of its rippling surface.

-

Secretly, fiercely, Primo had always loved _La Gioconda._

It was one of the records left behind, a well-worn, badly-scratched piece on four sides, a crumbling fold-out cardboard world of deception and glory, melodrama and obsession.

It was a perfect choice for a masterclass, of course, purely because it had a role for each voice, or in the case of the tenors and basses, several.

The master himself was a small, perfectly-proportioned man with a wide, barrel chest and the face of a painting whose eyes followed you around the room. Primo recognised him, of course. He was over from America, for a role in Milan, but he was a Roman, and had come home for long enough to teach.

Sometimes, music was work, and sometimes, it was dozen voices reaching for attention, and the surprised scrutiny of someone who knew what they were listening to, when Primo, assigned to the role of the prince --an aristocrat, jealous and fickle and disguised-- discovered the snarl he’d felt building for days exploding out of him, framed into something soaring and fierce, like being struck on the temple by an unexpected rock, and for an instant seeing a new colour, blinded by brilliance.

-

Primo was still coming down off the high the evening after, a card in his pocket which had a hastily scrawled number on it, a New York number, an unfamiliar configuration of figures.

For the second time in a week, he was caught off-guard, something slowly sloshing around in his mind, upsetting his balance.

-

Primo had been driving around hairpin turns on mountain roads since he had been tall enough to reach the pedals of his father’s shitbox car, and for all that family was a complicated thing, Primo was family, through and through. It was the kind of thing which felt written into him, dyed on the underside of his skin.

No _carabinieri_ in Calabria would have stopped him for it. He received a licence in the post on his fifteenth birthday. He’d never taken a test, or filled out a form. Like everyone else seemed to know, it didn’t matter at all. It was a formality, like working on the farm, like showing up in church on Sundays with clean hair and clean hands.

The day otherwise passed unremarked, and Primo went to choir practice in the evening like he always did, parking across the pavement outside the church with a lurch of abused suspension, cassette in the player cutting off with the ignition.

Stefano and his mother were home from Rome for the summer.

Something had happened to Stefano’s father, years ago, an exchange with a Latella man from the other side of the mountain which had started some kind of blood feud. The conflict had bloodied half the men in town. Primo remembered it, the way his own father had left the house and told him not to turn any lights on, how there had been gunshots on the street three nights in a row, and Primo had been barred inside like a girl, furious and silent. A whole family had been eradicated outside the grocery, six of them. They hadn’t been Nizzutos, but they had worked for them, so it was a blow and slight at once.

It had ended. It was always fleeting, like the weather. Everyone else hunkered down for cover while the storm passed around them. Mostly, Primo had been furious to be caged, and had shown his displeasure on his release by climbing up the peaks until he’d found a cabin with half a roof and the remains of a working fireplace. He had stayed there for six days until he got bored and came back down, going to the church instead of home with enough mud on his knees that Father Marco had made him change into his altar-boy uniform before he could join the choir.

Stefano had been missing, and that was the only thing which was different.

Primo learned later that Stefano’s whole family had been moved to Rome, to manage a building, some kind of punishment in the guise of a promotion.

The summer Primo turned fifteen, Stefano was back, standing at the back with his glasses askew, looking terrified. It was like watching a dog realise they were surrounded by animals with much bigger teeth, the scent of his fear almost palpable whenever any of the other boys elbowed each other and glanced in his direction.

Primo wondered if he knew he was pathetic, then decided swiftly that he didn’t care.

It was only after Stefano followed him out to the car when practice had finished that Primo got annoyed. “What?” he asked, flicking his keys around his finger so that they slammed sharply into his palm on every round. “Spit it out.”

“Happy birthday,” Stefano stammered, looking alarmed but strangely determined to get the words out. “It is today, isn’t it?”

“So?”

“Are… are you doing anything?”

The concept of ‘doing something’ for a birthday that wasn’t a Confirmation --which had passed the year before, with the looming absence of his father a constant strange hum around the event-- was deeply alien to Primo. August was for sweating, for preparing for harvests, for summer game and tomatoes, for watching people disappear indoors in the heat of the day and emerge at night with hot tempers. August was for fistfights in the streets and overheated cars. His father had once called it _fuck weather_ in his guttural way, before he’d gone out to do just that. Primo had patched the split lip he’d left behind when Primo had told him _you’ll have to get it up first_ with a wet towel, cold from the tap, and had spent the evening laying flat on his back in the crumbling courtyard garden behind the house, too hot to sleep.

“You’ve been away too long, city boy,” Primo said, “I’m working.”

It was a lie, but the question was too strange to meet with truth, like Stefano had lost his language in some indefinable way, had slipped out of the grasp of Calabria and now couldn’t understand his natal tongue.

Primo got in the car and drove away, back to Salvatore’s, because at least from there he could leave by the back gate and climb.

Leonardo was there, his car parked neatly by the barn, and so was Dante’s father, though Dante himself was nowhere to be seen. More infuriating were the scattered cars around the drive, local patriarchs, each of them in some way family to Salvatore, whether by marriage to one of his cousins or through his myriad sisters, nameless and faceless as soon as they’d disappeared into their husbands’ homes.

Primo let himself in through the back door, the one which connected to the barn. The kitchen was empty, which meant they were all in the basement. He could hear the barest vibration of voices, under his feet, if he stood still.

Experimentally, he lifted his foot, and stomped.

The voices went silent.

Primo was half-tempted to jump on the spot, to trace out the steps of the dance they all knew by heart, the rounded hops in time to imaginary drumbeats. The trapdoor under the floorboards in the hallway crashed open, and Leonardo shot his head out, aiming a pistol at Primo with his finger already on the trigger. When he saw Primo standing there with one foot raised, he lowered it. “You’re meant to be at Church,” he muttered, visibly relieved. “Stop fucking around.”

He called down that it was just Primo, and some garbled discussion followed, while Leonardo looked increasingly weary, one elbow rested on the lip of the floor where the door had hinged away. It was faintly ridiculous, all of it, and their eyes met across their gulf, mutually amused for a tiny moment. Then Leonardo bent down to hear something, and when he stood up again he was frowning. “Come down, if you’re here,” he said, beckoning Primo closer.

Primo had been in the basement, of course; it was a root cellar, bigger and deeper than most, with a tunnel collapsing into itself which led out under the back garden into the mountains, a leftover from the war, in disrepair. Primo would have fixed it, if this were his house, but it wasn’t, and Salvatore had left it to crumble.

The men were all standing around a fold-down table which Salvatore usually used for sorting potatoes, swept off but still dirt-streaked, the whole sweltering darkness of it only slightly cooler than the air outside. There were gas lamps in the corners, giving everything an eerie, storm-watch feeling, or like the guttering torches in an ancient tomb. There were papers on the table, lists, photographs of someone Primo vaguely recognised; maybe from a wedding, or a funeral, or the _Festa della Madonna._

The men all looked at him. Primo had, in some ways, grown used to having an audience. There was an art to it, to shouldering that attention. He angled his shoulders and found a position to lean in, poised at the bottom of the rickety ladder.

“You’re sure about this?” Dante’s father asked Salvatore. Don Salvatore--”

“His father should have done it,” Salvatore cut in, quick and gravelled, the voice of his own authority. “Never did manage to beat any sense into him, but the boy’s a good shot. We’ll bring him. He can learn.”

“He isn’t blooded.”

Primo had been blooded since he had been a child, but Salvatore was already speaking again, decisive and irritated. “So we do it now. He knows what’s good for him, don’t you?”

Primo felt Leonardo’s hand land on his shoulder, a warning pressure. Primo wanted to bite it off at the wrist. “Do what?”

“Come here. Who’s got a Madonna?”

Someone handed him a necklace, heavy gold, a rough relief of the Virgin with mournful eyes staring up from his palm. “Primo. You know the story. How we are all family, how we are the descendants of great knights, who would tolerate nothing less than independence from tyranny, yes?”

Primo knew the myths. Everyone knew the myths. It was what people clung to, when their friends and family died in the streets, or else there was no reason to any of it. Like church, or the bar, something to look at and think of when life was violent. “Of course.”

“Good. Touch it.”

Primo put his fingers on the little mould of Mary, trying not to wonder if this was meant to be funny, a crowd of grown men preparing for some kind of battle, acting as though they had made their own church under the earth, like an echoless negative of the surface world.

“Are you loyal?”

“Yes.”

“Will you protect the family, and make your own, for the greater one, as our ancestors did?”

Primo tried not to laugh. “Yes.”

“Give me your hand.”

For all that Salvatore was a small man, and weak in ways Primo considered obvious, he wasn’t slow. He cut a deep cross into his finger before he could jerk away, and Primo felt his control start to slip at the unexpected pain, at the insult of it, his lips peeling back off his teeth.

Salvatore let go. “The boy will drive. It’s time he started earning his keep anyway.”

Primo was ignored in an instant, the ridiculous pageantry over with, the medallion returned to its owner, who glanced at Primo with suspicion as he slung it back around his neck.

Primo had half a mind to just leave, now that his curiosity was sated, now that he had something he could take away from Salvatore, but before he could make it to the ladder, Leonardo cornered him, bending to hiss in his ear.

Salvatore had resumed the habit of a lifetime and was ignoring him, bent over the table with the other four men, their voices a tamped-down harmony, muffled by the dirt.

Leonardo was so unlike the surface version of himself, in the gloom of the cellar. Here his greying hair caught the gold from the lamps, a trace of flame gilding him where there should have been no shine at all. He looked fierce, and strange, and a little bit older.

He clamped a hand down over the back of Primo’s neck, and the weight of it was startling, his tapered fingers a new source of heat. “Primo. Listen to me. Don’t fuck around. Don’t mouth off. You want to be part of this? Family is forever, so now you fucking pay attention. You want to joke around, you cut it off at the root. Bite your tongue. No harebrained ideas. Nothing off the top of your head. No lies.” Leonardo’s hand was growing clammy on Primo’s skin, the sweat under Primo’s hair making a strange kind of glue between them, Leonardo’s thumb digging into the base of his skull with accidental precision. “I know you can shoot, and I know you can drive. Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll get better at the rest of it.”

“Better at pretending, you mean?” Primo asked him, sotto-voce, filled with fury.

“Exactly,” Leonardo whispered. “It’s a little bit make-believe, this shit. The pact, the fealty. The honour and the rest of it, how it runs in the veins? It’s all just traditions. The money and the reputation is what matters. And for the love of God, don’t _leave._ If you leave right now, it’ll be you we’re looking for this winter. Now _shut the fuck up._ ”

Primo snarled at him, crackling with rage. Silence was nothing. Nothing living was silent. Silence was what crept in when the air was gone.

Leonardo glanced up from his face, then down again, gauging the interest of the others. “ Shut up. Stay alive. Understand?”

Primo understood; everyone understood, in their own way. Primo understood that he was an afterthought, a pair of hands attached to a body, and even in this he was only part of an expectation which dwarfed him.

Blood dripped down his fingers, mingling with the dirt of the floor, the place below even the crooked foundations of the house, where the Earth was always waiting to swallow them.

-

Primo shot a man running out of a burning building in Mammola while he was laying on the roof of someone else’s car, the butt of his rifle kicking back into his collarbone at a strange angle, a shot in a million, a shot made in the dark, in the smoke, part of a war he wasn’t party to the logic of. A shot nobody saw.

-

Stefano’s flat smelled of cats and cigarettes and the faint mustiness of yarn. It was an old smell, that clung to old people and old places. It was narrow in the hall and crooked everywhere else, and on the walls were crosses, doilies and an effigy of Mary with a faded halo.

Primo’s aunt stared vaguely at him when she let him in, without a glimmer of significant recognition.

He supposed that was better, in the long run. Age sat on everybody differently, and for her, it seemed to have smothered her like a plastic sheet, sucking her cheeks in, flattening her hair, making claws of her hands. “I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?” she asked, tremulous, but Primo was certain then that she had once been a force, a faint echo of something sharp behind her filmy eyes. “How do you know Stefano?”

“We’re cousins,” he said, hands in his pockets, looking at all the ways someone had left this woman unprotected; she had open windows, and a wooden front door. The floor creaked, a draft under the seams. “From back home.”

She relaxed. “Of course. Now I remember. Come in, come in.”

Primo was choking back his third cup of tea when Stefano arrived.

Stefano always looked the same, when he was around Primo. He stared, and then he deflated, shoulders hunching up around his ears. His hair had begun to thin, ever so slightly, and he looked tired, but he’d always looked tired. “Primo.”

“Sit down,” Primo said, nudging the third chair out with his toes. “Maria Anna and I were just reminiscing. How could you leave her all alone on a Sunday?”

“It’s Saturday,” Stefano said, plaintively. “Rough night?”

“Late performance.” Primo waved away the slip, irritated with himself. “Are you a lawyer yet?”

“I’m studying for the exams.”

“Sit down,” Primo repeated, rattling the chair.

Stefano sighed at him and pulled out a cigarette, lighting it quickly, as though afraid Primo might take it away from him.

Primo had never quite understood what it was about him which made Stefano such a wreck around him, and like all mysteries it was vaguely infuriating. “You can relax, you know. I’m just here to talk.”

Stefano slumped down until his elbows met the table. “Okay, talk.”

Primo smiled at him and reached into Stefano’s gaping front pocket, the place where there was the bulge of a cigarette carton, and helped himself. He replaced it, just as easily. _See, nothing to worry about._

Maria Anna got up and came back with a plate of stale-looking biscuits, patting Stefano reassuringly on the shoulder as she sat back down between them. He could feel her attention, her attenuation to the nuances of men speaking at her table. They always seemed to, the old women, the ones who had seen a whole life.

“You remember that summer you came home?” Primo asked him, tasting smoke, erasing the lingering sourness of old milk and too much sugar. “We gave you a nickname.”

“No.”

“What was it? Fifty? Because you always had money, like an American, remember?”

Stefano flushed, though he gave a wan little nod. Primo almost wanted to shake him, tell him to stand up, that it didn’t matter if Primo was sitting here with their aunt, smoking his cigarettes and drinking his godawful tea. Primo didn’t want anything from him except information, and what did that cost him? Family was family, no matter what they thought of each other. Stefano would always be more beholden to Salvatore than he’d ever be to Primo. Primo wasn’t paying his fees. “I want to see your building,” Primo said, taking a biscuit. “I’m looking for a flat.”

Stefano exhaled so loudly it felt like an exercise. Breath control, building muscle to hold in the air. “I thought you were gone,” he said, quietly. “You know?”

“Not at all,” Primo said, biting into the horrible biscuit.

-

Primo found Carlo Laganà in six days.

Stefano turned over the lists of tenants he kept in a rolled-up map under his office chair, as though he’d seen a spy movie once and decided that was all he needed to know.

The tenement was in a slum neighbourhood on the edge of the city, near the part of the river which stank like a canal, rusted bicycles and cars poking out of it when the tide ebbed. It really would have been a terrible place to leave a body, with such variable conditions.

Finding someone in Rome had very little in common with the mountains, but where there were Calabrians there was talk, the words they used with each other, the rivalries. Primo sat, and listened; taking in the complaints of the tenants, the proprietors of the run-down fronts on the ground floor, who’d been shot where, which family was pressing their luck. It was like talking about the weather.

Who was shooting at who, who’d had an affair, whose extortion was going sideways. Whose children were going off the rails.

It was easy. There was a simplicity to it, a clarity of focus.

Primo watched the Tiber slide past with his feet up on the bonnet of a ruined Fiat, wondering why he felt breathless, furious, foreign.

Carlo Laganà came back for his heroin. He was always going to. Primo made a note of which flat the traitors who’d helped him lived in, and then, as he came down the rickety stairs, Primo strangled him unconscious on the ground floor landing. It felt soundless, hushed, familiar.

-

It took seven hours to drive from Calabria to Rome. Eight if the weather in the mountains was bad, if the snow was sending cars off the road and over the cliffs.

Carlo Laganà woke up and started yelling around the balled-up socks Primo had shoved in his mouth an hour after Primo had stashed him in a cupboard in the best place he could think of.

Federico’s neighbours had long since stopped banging on the walls about the all-hours practicing, the unadulterated sounds of fucking, the occasional screeching fight or hysterical phone call or experimental symphony of two, the nights all the parties had spilled over and people had woken up piled over each other on the couches.

One muffled man screaming his head off in a wardrobe was hardly going to disturb them.

Primo put a record on, and then another, and by the time Leonardo arrived he was higher than he should have been, crackling under his own skin, restless in a way that defied easy explanation. The heating had gone off, but that felt better, somehow. He was overheated, anyway, the exertion of carrying dead-weight up three flights of stairs only ameliorated by his lung capacity.

Leonardo arrived with a frown, shaking rain out of his hair.

He paused just inside the door, listening. Primo watched him, wondering when it might have happened that he’d surpassed his height, when it had been, what exact day in the last months that Leonardo would have had to start looking up at him.

“What is that?” Leonardo asked him, hoarse, a dampness in his voice.

Primo could almost taste the thickness of the air, the cloud that had descended over Rome, mist clouding in close to the shuttered windows, everything clammy and close. The cobbles would be slippery. The stairs would be treacherous.

“Tosca,” Primo told him, “obviously.”

“Not that.”

“Ah. Carlo.” Primo lay back down on the long couch he’d been occupying for hours, the kind of furniture which was exclusively for looking at, silver-thread brocade embroidery digging sharply into his back through his shirt. “He’s in there.”

Leonardo stared at him, dripping onto the Persian carpet, long since irreparably stained by a myriad of spilled drinks and bad stumbles. “Fucking hell, Primo. Whose flat is this?”

“Mine,” Primo said, unsure why it slipped out. “Borrowing it from a friend. He won’t be back any time soon. How’s the kid?” There was a moment --horrible, long, perfect-- in which Carlo’s unending fury made a base note with one of Tosca’s soaring harmonies, perfectly timed, awfully funny. “Is he as loud as this guy?”

Leonardo pulled his hand down his face, rubbing the shock off it. “No, he’s quiet. Can’t think where he gets it from.”

“Sure he’s yours?”

“You haven’t changed,” Leonardo said, flatly. “What kind of friend?”

Primo looked up at him, lips closed over his teeth. “Do you want to collect your package or not?”

“Turn up the record,” Leonardo said, quiet, so that his words were nearly swallowed by the music.

-

Carlo Laganà stopped screaming halfway through the third act, no gradual fade or graceful outro, just Leonardo’s voice, a short conversation and the prosaic sound of a muffled gunshot.

Leonardo emerged with his coat balled up under his arm, the rest of him looking just as dishevelled as he usually did; he was so easily ruffled, so often prone to sharp motion, belied by his placid form, his measured way of speaking.

“I’ll have someone come and take care of that.”

“Absolutely not. What do you think, I’m going to let some cousins move in, as soon as they’ve seen the place? Fuck off. You’re taking Carlo with you. You know where all the bodies are buried, add another one. Careful, he’s heavy.” Primo lit a cigarette, wondering when Leonardo would tell him to put it out. “You want a drink? Help yourself.”

Leonardo collapsed into the nearest chair with a glass of some kind of ludicrously expensive brandy from Federico’s depleted stocks, legs spread, belly starting to round out over his trousers. Marriage suited him.

He was close enough to touch. Primo dropped a hand off the side of the couch, letting his wrist lay over the top of Leonardo’s knee, blood-side up, feeling the realness of him, the solidity of his body, a faint voice in the back of his head quieted by the confirmation that this wasn’t something to wake up from and wonder at, no hallucination brought on by the bad combination of barbiturates and other things, or the resonance of the music and the drugs creating a sort of death’s-head vision.

Leonardo put his hand over the exposed skin, his warm fingers gripping Primo’s wrist so that he almost felt the bones shift together. “ _Primo._ ”

 _That’s my name,_ Primo didn’t say. “Still think you’ll tell people you knew me before I was famous?”

“I should have asked someone else. I knew you’d be-- ah, you crazy fuck.” Primo couldn’t tell whether he was talking to himself or not, his other hand clenched around his glass.

Primo tugged him off the chair by the grip he had on Primo’s wrist, a kind of self-sustaining tether between them that neither of them knew how to break, sitting up to meet him as he slid to his knees. “Leonardo. This one wasn’t your real problem. Watch your own side.”

“You always did have a good ear,” Leonardo said, into the side of Primo’s neck, heat of him fierce, burning, something from another season, like the year in reverse.

Primo hadn’t ever really imagined kissing him. That was the kind of fantasy left behind in silent beds, in muffled dreams, in the cold, still mountains before the meltwater chased away the quiet in the spring. Leonardo tasted like cigarettes, and the sound he made went through Primo’s body like a high note, difficult, hard to reach, a strange and bitter victory.

-

Leonardo fucked like he was drowning, somehow. Maybe with Regina he was an attentive lover, the kind of person who knew how to coax pleasure out of someone, but Primo dragged him down on top of him on the silver-and-blue brocade couch with a hand in his curling hair, still damp from the rain, and realised Leonardo was _letting_ him.

It was maddening, the clarity of realisation in Leonardo’s eyes, the way he sighted him, as though Primo was a shard of land sticking out into an uncertain sea. “If you’re just going to stare at me you can leave,” Primo muttered, something in his chest trying to work its way free at the closeness of him, the weight of his body, until Leonardo wrapped a hand around the back of his neck, clammy, warm, and it all shot through Primo at once; a kind of hatred, its own breed of attachment, almost umbilical.

The sound of skin was so different, every time, even amidst the quick snap of breaking buttons, the high-pitched whirr of a finishing record in the background, the quick hiss of indrawn breath. The whispered command to turn over which, for some reason Primo couldn't name, he wanted to obey.

  
How many times had anyone entered him like this, artless and urgent? Primo couldn’t have counted them on one hand, even if Leonardo hadn’t taken hold of both his wrists, palms tight over his broad bones, both of them crushed up against the awkward slant of the arm of the couch, meant for one person reclining, not two.

  
It hurt; it was always going to.

Maybe Leonardo meant it to, or Primo wanted it to. It wasn’t enough, until Leonardo curled an arm around his hips and held him still, breath coming in short, runner’s bursts.

  
Primo breathed. He must have, poised on the brink of pleasure, a nearness he’d never be able to name filling him with something which had more in common with rage than anything else. The pleasure built, involuntary and terrible, lead in his limbs, blood between his teeth where his lip had caught them.

  
Leonardo let go of his wrist to scrape the hair off Primo’s forehead, the weight of him flush against Primo’s back, looking at him, searching. Primo lost his grip on the fine balance of his high, lost in the slip and burn of his nearly-sated craving, and closed his eyes.

  
“No,” Leonardo said, voice so close to Primo’s ear that it reverberated, a buzz in his skull, right at the base. “No, look at me.”

  
Primo looked at him, and was caught by surprise by the force of it, the way his body reacted, with an unwelcome surrender, a gasp, a capitulation to being gentled.

  
-

  
Opening night in Napoli came on a Friday.

Primo woke up with his face mashed into a pillow around mid morning, a crust of cocaine cracking around his nostrils. For an instant, when he rolled onto his back, he saw stars.

Paolo had gone back to his room in a pre-performance sulk, and for an instant there was silence as the ringing in Primo’s ears from the morning rush of blood subsided.

Then there was the rustle of curtains by the half-open window, freezing air sweeping through the room, and Primo exhaled, feeling it move.

-

Primo hadn’t really ever spoken to Regina.

She was around in the village, sometimes, standing with the other women when there were events in the piazza, and he saw her at church, with her lace veil over her curling black hair and her beautiful face framed like the Madonna.

The morning of the wedding, Primo was having a cigarette by the long-dried fountain which had been a watering place for sheep once, judging from the crumbling ram’s head which had once been its spout. Now it mostly had empty bottles in it, old newspaper, wax wrapping from the bakery, and enough cigarette butts to make it a graveyard of sorts. Primo was contemplating his nauseous hangover when Regina approached him, her arms full of vegetables, a determined smile on her face which didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“Good morning,” she said, firmly. There was no pleading in her voice. She had a calm mezzo, a wry tone, a deceptive depth. “You’re up very early.”

“Aren’t you meant to be getting married in a few hours?”

“I drove up early, too.” She glanced at the space next to him, perching on the uncertain stonework, which might have collapsed under someone heavier than either of them. “Forever, I suppose.”

“Isn’t that how weddings work?”

“Unless you’re very unlucky, or very unfaithful.” Regina eyed him, taking his measure. “I’ve been unlucky.”

“You’re still alive, aren’t you?” Primo asked, rhetorically. He had seen the wreck of the car, weeks ago. Not enough weeks for her pregnancy to be showing, but still, long enough.

“If you ever do something like that to him again, I will find a way to make you pay,” Regina said, quietly. “I’ve lost a husband to the family already, and I won’t lose another one like that. Do you understand? I’ve left my whole life for him, my village, everything, because he’s kind, and he’s strange, and I think we’ll be happy.”

Primo had shrugged over his lighter, replacing his spent cigarette. “I don’t control the weather.”

“That’s what you all call it, up here? The weather?”

Primo just smiled at her, trying to find something in her face which was familiar. Very occasionally, a carload of tourists drove through town, always foreigners, people who exclaimed at the remoteness of it, the crumbling grandeur of the architecture, took some pictures with their big Polaroid cameras, and left again. People who didn’t know what they were looking at.

Not very many strangers stayed, if they didn’t have to. “We’ll all drink a toast tonight for the two of you, and mean it, you know.”

“How old are you?” Regina asked him, smiling across the square, a vague friendliness directed at whoever was watching.

“Sixteen,” Primo said, around the butt in his teeth.

“You’re very talented,” Regina told him, as though it were a tragedy.

-

Primo had fought for the role, in Napoli.

That was the big secret, the mystery, the grain of sand in the oyster.

Idamante, the doomed son. Idamante, the romantic. Idamante, the banished.

Paolo had wanted to cast a mezzo-soprano, the kind of woman who could bring a theatre to their knees with her voice, the imaginary youth, the vanished castrato space where there was an eternal high note, a _tremolo_ no living voice could replicate.

Primo had called in a favour, leveraged a secret, reminded a donor of a debt, and in the end there was a space for him, for the role, for the season. For two months in Napoli, close enough to Calabria that he could almost touch it.

-

Before the curtain rose, nobody’s grudges mattered.

They would matter after, but in the breathless hush as the lights in the house dimmed and the orchestra set bows to strings, the dark was bodiless, formless, a waiting space.

Then someone elbowed Primo in the ribs and he snarled at them, and the first notes played, and everything else rushed out.

It lived in the music, the story. Maybe there were better singers, people who treated their instruments with reverence, but Primo, more than any of them, knew these stories.

Stories of fathers and sons, of lovers condemned, this story of asking to be forgiven for the sins of others.

If he’d never once achieved grace, there was at least a kind of glory in this, a sordid, vicious joy to be had in making something his, putting his voice into the music, and receiving the rewards of it, the raw thrill of his own force.

When the lights went up for the bows, he caught a glimpse of leonine grey hair in the audience, close to the stage, but it could have been anyone.

-

It was well past midnight when Primo emerged from the stage door, sated, for a while. Until tomorrow, at least, Paolo’s insipid relief manifesting in a hasty, grateful blowjob in the dressing room, soft hands and soft lips, and Primo had taken it, blown wide open with adrenaline and a bump of cocaine in the aftermath.

He lit a cigarette in the cold air outside the theatre and started for the hotel, paid for by the producers, laundering money through the arts. It was all money, and it was all reputation.

Primo heard the whistle at the last moment, before he turned onto the boulevard leading towards the sea.

Leonardo had claimed a table out of the glow of a street lamp, the ones usually occupied by old men playing cards, scratched and battered from poor use. He had his elbows up on the edge of it, the other chair kicked out and waiting.

“Did you just fucking whistle at me?” Primo asked him, looking down at him.

“You’re always listening,” Leonardo replied. “Do you want to sit?”

Primo did, wrung-out and wired, unable to contain the restlessness of his comedown competing with his easy high. “Why did you send me those goddamn flowers?”

“Who says it was me?” Leonardo asked him, lighting them both a second smoke.

Primo took the cigarette, tempted to get up and walk away.

“How do you do that?” Leonardo asked him, finally, blowing smoke and steam into the night, the piazza quiet around them, even the bars muted in the wide space. “The--” waved his hand, abrupt, inarticulate, sharp. “All of it. How does it work?”

“I don’t know,” Primo admitted.

“You hardly sounded human.”

“That’s the point.” Primo smoked himself into silence, thinking, watching Leonardo’s face. “Did you like it?”

“I liked the story.”

“You would,” Primo muttered. “Nobody dies in the end.”

“Fuck you.”

“One of the producers wants to,” Primo said, watching his face. “He’s very well-connected. Sicilian.” Primo put his cigarette out on the table. “Are you coming, or not? It’s a walk.”

Leonardo got up and followed him. “I thought it would be funny,” he said, a hint of the firebrand he had been creeping around the edges of his newer calm. “The flowers.”

Primo ignored him, refusing to give him the softness he was looking for, always hoping to find. Leonardo had always played a longer game for revenge than anyone gave him credit for.

-

Leonardo’s hand always ended up on the back of his neck, whether they were face to face, or like tonight, Primo with his face pressed up against the mattress with his eyes open, voice caught in his chest until it shook loose, a flood of curses, a rib-cracking laugh.

Leonardo’s fingers slipped through Primo’s hair, wet from his skin, his lips rough against the back of Primo’s shoulder, almost a scrape of teeth. Almost.

Sometimes, he said a prayer to the Madonna under his breath, reflexive, explosive, anything but rote.

-

“I’ve got an offer in New York.”

“Are you going to take it?”

“Probably.”

Leonardo passed him the cigarette, putting it to his lips, letting his fingers linger. “Plenty of Sicilians in New York,” he said, wryly. “Don’t forget us.”

-

The night before Primo left Calabria, he slept in the cabin he’d been shoring up for three years, with all the windows and doors open to the night chorus, the insects, the animals, the occasional mournful cry of a bird. The wind.

It was spring, cold and crisp in the evening and wet overnight, so that when he woke up the hollow around the hut was strewn with dew, and the sun bounced off it in all directions.

He lay on the cot he had dragged up there after his father’s death and wondered if he was shaking off some kind of dream, a sense of being clung to lingering in his body.

He put on a record, choosing one from the old trough he’d stacked them into, covered with a salvaged bit of plywood, and then on an impulse he couldn’t name, lay down in the open doorway, arms spread past the threshold, hands palm up in the spring grass.

He was listening to the second side of Rigoletto again when he heard Leonardo’s footsteps, the way he walked, the rasp of his breath, all of it a familiar soundscape. It had to be Leonardo. Only Leonardo cursed under his breath when there was no-one to hear him do it, only Leonardo would come up here on foot after Primo had put a gun in his face for it last time.

He’d never been afraid of Primo at all, not even for a moment, and there was something odd about that, something indefinable in the way Leonardo looked at him, as though Primo was some kind of frustrating puzzle, a sum he couldn’t solve.

“What do you want?” Primo asked him, before he’d quite crested the little lip the cabin was built into, a few stones rattling down as Leonardo stopped.

Inside, where most of Primo’s chest still was, Rigoletto unleashed his fury on the Duke, a great baritone rumble, a flood of rage, a thrum through Primo’s ribs where they were pressed against the floor.

He squinted up at Leonardo, a glint of sun in his eyes, the angle making Leonardo look gigantic, a titan looming into view.

“You were expected at the meeting last night,” Leonardo said, sitting down in the grass, still slightly out of breath at the climb. “I came up here to ask what the fuck you were thinking, not showing up.”

“What do you think, Mr. Accountant?”

“Ah, Primo. Nobody has any clue what goes on in that head of yours. Salvatore thinks it’s just music, that you’re too full of nonsense to respect anything else.” Leonardo put a blade of grass between his teeth, chewing it slowly. “I wonder whether we should have killed you by now. You know what we do to liabilities, don’t you?”

“Not the Don’s idiot brother, though.”

“There’s plenty of room for idiots,” Leonardo told him, before he reached out, quick as a snake, and brushed a strand of Primo’s hair off his face, fingers warm and smooth against Primo’s cool forehead. “Idiots can be useful. Idiots aren’t a threat.”

“ _You’re_ still alive.”

“So maybe I’m an idiot.”

Primo tucked his hands behind his head, raising his eyes for a better look. “Maybe.”

Leonardo lit a cigarette. For once, Primo had no urge to take it from him, instead just watching him smoke, and listening to the music. “If there was more than this,” Primo asked him, teasing, pulling, wanting to see him snarl, “what would it be?”

“Don’t fucking ask me that, you little shit. No jokes.”

“I’m leaving,” Primo told him, unsure why. To anyone else, it would have been all the rope they’d need to string him up in the square. “Tonight. Going to Rome.”

“And what? You want a round of applause?”

Primo thought about it, watching the sky, the clouds scudding over the trees, the vastness of it, the way it seemed empty at a glance. _What’s wrong with that?_ “Yeah. A fucking standing ovation,” he said. “That’s what I want.”

-

Maybe it went like this, years afterwards.

Maybe there was a party, somewhere in Rome, where a nearly-famous tenor just back from New York slipped in unannounced, and stood on the periphery of it, watching the spectacle of rock stars cavorting with an erstwhile billionaire. Maybe he wondered what a different version of himself might have done, listening to the shards of conversations all around town about the boy with red hair who looked like he’d fallen off the wall of a gallery instead of out of some old miser’s pocket.

Maybe the pull of it was irresistible, the cracks in the world ready to be pried open, for anyone daring enough.

Maybe nobody ever outruns the chorus.

-

**Author's Note:**

> [takes a huge hit off my gigantic blunt] what if... right.... like, what if PRIMO,,, loved OPERA.
> 
> Lagardère in particular deserves a round of applause (I know, shut up) for her brilliant and insightful commentary at every turn. Thank you, friend. This is such a weird fic, and you read all of it when it was mostly nonsense. Gratitude.
> 
> There are a number of opera-related Easter eggs in here for any of you nerds, and I would be delighted at any time to discuss them. Title comes from a Mozart _cantata_ called "Davide Penitente" in which there is an aria titled ["a te, fra tanti affanni,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QLqn1Zv6NI) meaning "to you, amidst such troubles." I personally find it quite interesting and _very_ much a piece for a Mozart tenor. If you feel like it, click link to listen. 
> 
> Also yes, I know it sounds like “fanny” and I DO think I’m funny.
> 
> Tumblr [here.](https://formerlyfebricant.tumblr.com/post/638837449197551616/read-on-ao3-rated-e-22000-words-maybe-there)


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